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New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk Policy and Psychiatric Emergencies among Black Americans

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Abstract

Under the Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) policy, New York City (NYC) police stopped Black Americans at more than twice the rate of non-Hispanic whites, after controlling for arrests and precinct differences. We examined whether police stops of Black Americans during SQF correspond positively with psychiatric emergency department (ED) visits among Black residents in NYC. We utilized as the exposure all police stops, stops including frisking, and stops including use of force among Black Americans in NYC between 2006 and 2015 from the New York City Police Department’s New York City—Stop, Question, and Frisk database. We examined 938,356 outpatient psychiatric ED visits among Black Americans in NYC between 2006 and 2015 from the Statewide Emergency Department Database (SEDD). We applied Box-Jenkins time-series methods to control for monthly temporal patterns. Results indicate that all stops, frisking, and use of force of Black residents correspond with increased psychiatric ED visits among Black Americans in NYC (all stops—coef = 0.024, 95%CI = 0.006, 0.043; frisking—coef = 0.048, 95%CI = 0.015, 0.080; use of force—coef = 0.109, 95%CI = 0.028, 0.190). Our findings indicate that a one standard deviation increase in police stops equates to a 2.72% increase in psychiatric ED visits among Black residents in NYC. Use of force may have the greatest mental health consequences due to perceived threats of physical violence or bodily harm to other members of the targeted group. Racially biased and unconstitutional police encounters may have acute mental health implications for the broader Black community not directly involved in the encounter itself.

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Aggregated datasets and/or code provided upon request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

National Institute of Mental Health (1R21MH110815-01A1).

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  1. Program in Public Health, University of California, 653 East Peltason Drive, Irvine, CA, 92617, USA

    Abhery Das & Tim A. Bruckner

  2. Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy, University of California, Irvine, USA

    Tim A. Bruckner

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AD developed the research question and conducted the analysis. AD wrote the first draft of the manuscript. TB assisted with the analysis, interpretation, and writing.

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Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 3
figure 3

Residual count of psychiatric ED visits among Black Americans in New York City, 2006–2015, with mean = 0, after controlling for psychiatric ED visits among non-Hispanic white Americans and removal of autocorrelation. First 4 months lost to time-series modeling

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Fig. 4
figure 4

Count of psychiatric Emergency Department visits among non-Hispanic white Americans over 120 months in New York City, 2006–2015

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Table 3 Outlier-adjusted time-series results predicting psychiatric Emergency Department visits among non-Hispanic Black in New York City from 2006 to 2015, as a function of police stops, stops including frisking, and stops including use of force among Black Americans in New York City
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Table 4 Time-series results predicting psychiatric emergency department visits among Black Americansa in New York City from 2006 to 2015, as a function of police stops, stops including frisking, and stops including use of force that did not result in an arrest
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Das, A., Bruckner, T.A. New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk Policy and Psychiatric Emergencies among Black Americans. J Urban Health 100, 255–268 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-022-00710-x

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