Finding a home in the stop-and-frisk regime.

Wright, Wendy

THEY DON'T GET STOPPED WHEN THEY CARRY THEIR FOOTBALL HELMETS, a high school football explained (Baker et al. 2010). Many of his players walked the few blocks home together, to or near the local high-rise housing complex project in Brooklyn. At the start of the season, the boys were stopped by police almost every day on their walk home. They were put up against the closest wall, yelled at, searched, and sent on their way. Several boys nearly quit the after-school program. When the coaches reached out to the patrolling officers, they were advised that the group of young men looked suspiciously like a gang gathering. Therefore, the officers were in their jurisdiction to stop the youths under the New York Police Department's (NYPD) stop-question-and-frisk program.

The coaches conferred and came up with the idea of allowing the team members to carry their helmets home with them, despite it being against general policy--teens are notorious for losing school property. With their helmets gripped by the face masks, these boys became recognizable to police officers as an after-school football team. The boys told their coaches that they do not get stopped so much anymore (Baker et al. 2010).

Stop-and-frisk, the controversial--yet widespread--approach to urban policing, is an incursion of state power into everyday life. This article is concerned less with stop-and-frisk as a legal issue or individual policing tactic than with the collisions of control, freedom, dignity, and surveillance that characterize the phenomenon. The central question asked is: What is at stake when life is lived under a stop-and-frisk regime? These broader normative questions are nearly unexplored within the context of stop-and-frisk, though recent law-and-society and related scholarship has engaged contemporary policing and law enforcement more broadly (including Davis 2011, Dilts 2012, Gottschalk 2014, Guenther 2013, Lerman and Weaver 2014, Murakawa 2014, Threadcraft 2014). By mapping the mass deployment of stop-and-frisk as a form of social control, this study examines the quality of life in the new carceral state. In this context, "quality of life" refers both to the colloquial usage--how good or bad one's life is--and to certain textures and boundaries of political life. Similarly, in tracing the processes by which stop-and-frisk practices are constructed as legitimate forms of state coercion, this study also examines the effects of neoliberal reform and structural racism at a time in which it is especially hard to pinpoint the mechanisms through which those operate. To get at the everyday quality of life, I deploy the framework of the home as a site of self-creation developed in Black feminist literature.

Between 2005 and 2012, the NYPD documented over four million stops; about 87 percent of individuals stopped were identified as Black or Hispanic; in 90 percent of the cases, no citation or arrest was made. In an analysis of 2011, the New York Civil Liberties Union found that although they only made up "4.7 percent of the city's population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011" (NYCLU 2012). Also in this report, the NYCLU found that, at the height of the program, guns were found in significantly fewer than one percent (.1138%) of all stops. Whereas this article focuses on New York as a case study, it is important to note that stop-and-frisk has become the US model of policing, prevalent in cities such as Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Miami. Civil rights groups across the nation have reported abuses associated with these programs. Despite these controversies, however, stop-and-frisk has been integrated into institutional procedure as routine police work.

The emerging interdisciplinary research on stop-and-frisk has explored the inefficiency, disruptiveness, and racial disparities endemic to the practice (see, inter alia, Fagan and Geller 2010, Ferrandino 2013, Rosenfeld and Fornango 2014, Zeidman 2012). Further, stop-and-frisk is identified as part of the expansion of policing powers and discussed in the context of the relationship of policing to the broader US carceral apparatus (see, inter alia, Garland 2012, Gilmore 2005, Gottschalk 2006, Perkinson 2010, Thompson 2010, Wacquant 2009, Weaver 2007). However, most of this scholarship has been empirical and/or historical. By shifting the terrain of the law-and-society analysis to the normative, this essay seeks to rearticulate and reestablish the political and ethical stakes of the carceral state and its inhering social control. This approach also builds on recent work in other areas of political thought, such as the scholarship by Heath Fogg-Davis (2014), which employ political theory that is more acutely attendant to emergent political realities. In examining the inter-relationship between contemporary forms of racial and class control, this article contributes to the growing generation of critical race theory that critiques the so-called post-racial moment.

Stop-and-frisk ought to be understood both as a policing technique on its own and as a cog of the expansive (and expanding) carceral apparatus, which includes not only the institutions of criminal control, but also the broad set of technologies, logics, and mechanisms of discipline and power that Foucault (1977) argues characterize the modern police society. As such, the carceral apparatus has material effects on the experience of freedom in the everyday lives of its targets. Furthermore, the stop-and-frisk procedure is highly racialized and class-specific. The first section of this article introduces stop-and-frisk as a case to be explored, contextualizing stop-and-frisk as a policing tactic as well as reviewing the constitutional history of the state coercive form under which stop-and-frisk is categorized. The first section also briefly reviews the recent legal controversy (through 2015) that challenges the constitutionality of the practice of stop-and-frisk. The next section introduces the concept of home as a framework to understand the existential content of stop-and-frisk as a feature of life in neighborhoods like Brownsville, the South Bronx, and East Harlem. This particular concept of home as a framework combines Iris Marion Young's (1997, 2005) reconsideration of the home as a site of self-realization with the aspirational construction of the home in Black feminist theory, for example in the literature of bell hooks (1990) and Toni Morrison (2010a,b). Based on this construction of the home, this article analyzes the methods by which stop-and-frisk denies subjectivity and limits the possibilities for self-liberation. The final section argues that stop-and-frisk persists despite the damage it causes because it functions at the nexus of the neoliberalizing city and post-racial white supremacy.

This article mobilizes the concept of home somewhat unusually. Referring to the writings of Young, this concept of home pushes against its limitations as a confining private sphere, propelling forward a conception of "home" akin to hooks's "homeplace." This vision of home is not bounded by the four walls of the domicile. Instead, the home extends into those parts of the physical daily life where one feels at home. Here, home becomes the solid foundation on which a self-directed identity is built. This identity is not merely a psychological construction; rather, these psychic outcomes emerge from the real, material places in which one recognizes oneself as at home. In his memoir essay, "Mapping Home," Aleksandar Hemon (2011) describes the feeling of moving about the city that was his home, Sarajevo, as one of being able to define himself in terms of his space. His life felt significant to him to the extent that it existed in this home-public; his identity became inextricable from certain physical spaces. When this homespace was disrupted and destroyed by war, Hemon found himself adrift, detached, displaced. His home city was one "where people would forever know and recognize you, the space that identified you." Exiled by war, Hemon felt out of place, unrecognizable, unable to locate his identity.

Empirical approaches to alienation have also recognized the value of the home. Recent studies in neuroanthropology suggest that a secure home is a key factor in achieving positive life outcomes and equally important in avoiding negative outcomes, such as incarceration. Allen (2015) argues that feelings of home were a cornerstone of human evolutionary development, functioning interdependently with the development of language and culture. Allen offers a rich definition of the home as the site in which a unique identity is formed at the intersection of place and selfhood.

Those familiar with New York City and other similar urban spaces will easily recognize the way in which neighborhoods, sidewalks, the perimeters of home life are at once public spaces and home places. The boundaries of one's home do not stop at the apartment door, but instead extend onto one's stoop, block, and corner bodega. Experiences often considered to be private regularly play out in the streets. The phenomenon of crying on Manhattan avenues has received particular attention in recent years (Febos 2011), but the centrality of the street as an extension of personal space had already been richly described in NYC's twentieth-century canon of Black literature. Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), and Ellison's Invisible Man (1952/1995) all feature walking the streets as key formative elements of the Black male narrators' coming of age. The public nature of New York life forces these characters' dominions to move beyond the traditional private walls, extending their homes onto the street.

This conception of home is multi-modal, transcending traditional boundaries of public and private space and of collective and individual experience. Home-ness as a concept is intuitively accessible: we understand the dialectical power between individual identity and home, be those homes as immediate as the hearth or as expansive as the homeland. A home is identity grounding, but it also connects individual identity with collective identity, framing the relationship between collectives and their material contexts. This framework provides a vantage point from which all aspects of the home can be analyzed, from the physical space in which it exists to the institutional arrangements with which it must negotiate. Further, the use of homespaces by marginalized peoples acts as a form of resistance to state, capitalist, and white supremacist violence. In this, the politics of everyday life is laid bare, and the exercise of power becomes more visible.

The Practice and Law of Stop-and-Frisk

Although stopping, questioning, and frisking individuals has long been a standard technique of police practice, stop-and-frisk policies have emerged over the past decade as a central, policy-driven element of urban policing, most notably in New York City. The specific practice was legitimated by the Supreme Court decision in Terry v. Ohio (1968), but New York City transformed it from a tool to a strategy of policing. In the decade following 9/11, the city averaged over half of a million stops annually, with most stops taking place in poor minority communities. Following a series of lawsuits, NYC has mitigated its use of stop-and-frisk; however, the model continues to flourish in urban police departments across the nation, with major implementations in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles (James 2015).

Journalists and community activists have captured qualitative experiences of stop-and-frisk. In an investigative report by WYNC News's Ailsa Chang, one source reported being stopped "up to five times a month"; many interviewees reported that at the time they were stopped-and-frisked, they were simply walking down the street, not doing anything that could be identified as suspicious (Chang 2011b). In a survey of over a thousand individuals conducted by a community research initiative, the Morris Justice Project, 52 percent of respondents stated that they had been stopped four or more times in their lives (Public Science Project 2013). Some respondents indicated that the police had used racist, sexualized, and homophobic language during these stops; over half of the interviewees reported that they felt targeted by police because of their age, race/ethnicity, gender, immigration or employment status, or sexual orientation. (1) In summarizing the experiences of their respondents, the Morris Justice Project leaders reported that "being stopped has become a part of everyday life" (Public Science Project 2013).

In reference to the intensity of policing in the South Bronx, Robin Steinburg of Bronx Defenders, a legal defense organization, argues that "if police officers policed the Upper East Side of Manhattan the way they do in this community, there would be an uproar" (Chang 2011a). In the New York Times, Nicholas Peart (2011) describes his experiences and reactions to living in New York City and being the object of stop-and-frisk policies. He recounts his mother teaching him at a young age that he would be the target of potentially violent policing, and then later being the target of it. Between 2006 and 2010, Peart (2011) was stopped-and-frisked four times, with a gun drawn on him on one occasion. Peart stated that these experiences changed his everyday experience of appearing in public. He adjusted where he would spend time in public as well as when and how he would appear when he did so. He sums up his experiences: "Essentially, 1 incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer's gun at my head." Reflecting on the stop-and-frisk regime as it is experienced by young men of color, Peart (2011) writes: For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don't run and don't try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way--degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we're Black or Latino.

Respondents to the Morris Justice Project (Public Science Project 2013), which examined the effects of stop-and-frisk in the South Bronx, were explicit in their perception of stop-and-frisk as something that characterized their daily life and that negatively affected their experience of their home neighborhood. Over 75 percent of those respondents had been stopped, and half of those stopped reported that they were just outside of their home when the stop was made: in front of their buildings, on the corner, in the hallways, or on their stoops. In New York City, these spaces are treated and understood as part of one's home, as demonstrated by multiple reports concerning stop-and-frisk. One respondent was clear in his/her frustration with stop-and-frisk: "This is our home. We have the right to stand, talk, play, and be in our neighborhood" (The Public Science Project 2013). In a report by the Vera Institute of Justice, 44 percent of young people reported that they had been stopped "frequently ... repeatedly ... 9 times or more" (Fratello and Rengifo 2013).

The intensity of these stops typifies the hot spots policing initiative, an approach to patrol distribution wherein large numbers of police are deployed proactively to areas identified as "high-crime." This model is defended by police (without clear empirical evidence) as a necessary element of police practice to lower crime rates. Supporters of this practice suggest that the populations affected by these policies--namely, young Black and brown men--are also those who are benefiting from the policies through reduced crime rates, most notably in the reduction of homicide rates (Francescani et al. 2012). Although he acknowledged some benefits of the practice, Franklin Zimring (2011) ultimately concluded that any significant drops in crime rate were not due to stop-and-frisk policies, but rather resulted from other policing innovations.

In 2014, court rulings against the NYPD coincided with the mayoral election of progressive Bill de Blasio, who promised significant changes to the implementation of stop-and-frisk (Weiser and Goldstein 2014). Despite these alleged reforms, the complicated relationship between state forces and vulnerable populations persists. Even with limitations aimed at reducing the number of stops to pre-stop-and-frisk era levels, it is likely that several hundred thousand stops will still be conducted annually, given the persistence of police leadership in defending the practice as necessary, the history of police stops, and the high ratio of officers to local community members (Gepner and Prendergast 2016). Perhaps even more importantly, stop-and-frisk has pushed the frontier of policing intensity to new limits. (2) As a particular police tactic, stop-and-frisk represents a site at which the stakes involved in the conflict between state power and individual rights are brought into material relief. In neighborhoods fraught with violence, stop-and-frisk is identified by police and even some community members as an anti-violence measure, while it is simultaneously experienced as a form of violence by its targets. Stop-and-frisk is, per constitutional jurisprudence, a legal and reasonable search and seizure of the body; the bodies subjected to this interference, however, have named these stops "harassments," "violations," and "discriminatory" (Chang 201 lb).This difference in interpretation exposes the conflict between the vision of a universal liberal citizen and the lived reality of individuals who are situated as non-universal by their identity positions. The failure of the individual to position him/herself as the universal becomes a failure of citizenship; identity politics is reconstructed as inherently apolitical, unreasonable, and potentially undemocratic. Stop-and-frisk opens an opportunity to further explore the ways that particular individuals--in this case, young, Black and brown, largely poor men--exist within the imagined liberal universal whole while simultaneously attempting to survive at the centripetal core of a carceral state built upon hierarchies of race, class, and place.

The concept of the home functions as a site through which experiences of self-determination and security are constructed. In defense of stop-and-frisk policy, former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly argued that "they," those who live in the neighborhoods most heavily targeted by stop-and-frisk, are the ones who pushed for more intensive policing (Kelly 2013). Indeed, the demographic most likely to be stopped-and-frisked is also the demographic most likely to be victim of violent crime. However, by framing the residents'requests for higher quality of life as requests for the intensification of stop-and-frisk strategies, Kelly betrays a limited vision of the appropriate role of policing: one that is grounded in a neoliberal logic wherein the citizen must be tightly regulated by the state except when acting in his/her proper market capacity. Framing the home as a central concept enables the concrete, material critique of the neoliberal norms at the heart of stop-and-frisk policy.

Locating Home

In her essay, "Home," Toni Morrison (2010a) narrates her search for authority--the ability to narrate her own existence and to be sovereign--as a search for a site where racial ideology does not function as an authority that displaces her own. Home becomes a metaphor for the place in which she might find these elusive goods. In articulating an imagined site that is real enough to be imagined but also free from the externally defined strictures of racism, Morrison proposes home as a "suitable term" that makes certain analogic points possible. First, she distinguishes the house from the home, conjuring the image of a structure that, although framed by someone else, must be self-created in order to attain its complex social meaning. Morrison devotes most of this essay to the complications of making and living in such a home, offering both emotive and intellectual visions of home as a meaningful category. In her novel, Paradise, Morrison offers a home-space as a place in which

a sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because whatever it was that made that sound, it wasn't something creeping up on her. Nothing for miles around thought she was prey. (Morrison 2010b, 8)

Morrison argues that this vision of home necessitates the ability to securely navigate the world knowing that one is both "psychically and physically safe" (Morrison 2010a, 8). Having a home that meets these criteria is necessary for both the establishment of a positive identity and as a precursor to more ambitious individuated goods, including the ability to posit oneself as a rightful political subject. Through this conception, the home becomes a crucial site for self-determination, in terms of both identity formation and the creation of the conditions necessary for external transformation.

Home as Both Political and Pre-Political

Iris Marion Young (1997, 135) argues that "the idea of home ... carries critical liberating potential because it expresses uniquely human values." Here, Young pushes against earlier feminist conceptions of the home as a sphere of domestic oppression, exempted from state protections. Indeed, she argues that having a home, a site that "supports [one's] life activities" (Young 1997, 149), is necessary in the process of expanding the possibilities for self-determination in modern life. In this conception, the goods that a true home confers are both an important condition for the development of a liberated, agentic identity and also part of the everyday processes of expanding one's agency, participating in political discourse, and being recognized as a citizen of one's community.

Young proposes a vision of the home that is characterized by the stable meaning-making that the subject enacts through the processes of coming to know a space intimately, naming its features, shaping it, and making it intimate:

There are two levels in the process of the materialization of identity in the home: (1) my belongings are arranged in space as an extension of my bodily habits and as support for my routines, and (2) many of the things in the home, as well as the space itself, carry sedimented personal meanings as retainers of personal narrative. (Young 2005, 138)

This conception of the home recognizes the embodied nature of the subject, and, in that recognition, identifies the body-in-place as a site where the subject may act out minute processes of self-determination. These minute processes may include such small methods as the arrangements of one's effects; however, even the smallest of these processes gestures towards larger personal arrangements of family, community, and practices of living.

The maintenance of a safe, self-created home enables the subjects to establish themselves in time and space as powerful agents with politically viable identities: "Home as the materialization of identity does not fix identity but anchors it in physical being that makes a continuity between past and present. Without such anchoring of ourselves in things, we are, literally, lost" (Young 1997, 140).

bell hooks (1990) develops a complementary argument, emphasizing that the homeplace is not only a pre-political site of self-creation, but, to the extent that the homeplace exists, it is, in itself, a site for resistance among those who face daily structures of oppression, hooks explicitly refers to the African-American experience and grounds her argument--which is unmistakably about liberation--in the affective experience of daily life. In narrating the value of the homespace, hooks recalls feelings of peril. When traversing the poor white neighborhood on the other side of which her grandmother lived, she remembers: they walked by "porches [that] seemed to say 'danger,' 'you do not belong here,' 'you are not safe'" (hooks 1990, 383). She contrasts this endangerment with the elation of arriving at her grandmother's home: "Oh! that feeling of safety, of arrival, or homecoming when we finally reached the edges of her yard" (ibid.). In analyzing this memory, hooks centralizes the home as a site of political practice, drawing particular attention to the creation of these spaces by African-American women. The process of creating a safe, secure homeplace wherein "one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist" was and is, by hooks's account, an act of "decolonization" (ibid., 387). The creation of a space wherein individuals are treated humanely and with regard and dignity creates the foundation for a politically realized consciousness. The project of creating and defending this homeplace is a fundamental element of the process of "giving life new meaning" by furthering the "Black liberation struggle" (ibid., 389).

In abstracting the political stakes involved in the creation and maintenance of such a homeplace, one might think of Drucilla Cornell's (1995, 240) formulation of the imaginary domain, in which she articulates a vision of the "minimum conditions of individuation" from which one may possibly engage in a (self-)liberatory struggle. The process of becoming a "free person" requires to have, among other things, both "bodily integrity" and the ability to imagine oneself as a whole person (ibid., pp. 240-41). By incorporating the visions of Young and hooks, a safe, secure homeplace can foster a sufficient physical and mental integrity from which, and even in which, the individual might become free.

Home, Stop-and-Frisk, and Self-Determination

To the extent that stop-and-frisk disrupts, violates, and transforms the homeplace into a site of physical and mental insecurity, it also disrupts this process of self-liberation. This argument does not mean that political self-realization is not possible without a secure home--history can certainly provide any number of realized subjects who have emerged from no place like home--nor does it indicate that stop-and-frisk is unique in its disruption of the homeplace. Instead, the usage of the home as a site for analyzing stop-and-frisk allows one to point more directly to the sociopolitical consequences of stop-and-frisk as a mass phenomenon.

The feeling of unsafeness engendered by the insecurity of the homeplace is an important technology of discipline as well as a message from the institutions of power. It reminds the subject to act in certain ways while also creating a script in which the object of the stop is already constructed as criminal. As such, the object of the stop exists without a home. As bell hooks (1990) argues, the object of the stop has no right to have "access to private space where we [Black people] do not directly encounter white racist aggression" (hooks 1990, 47). These persons become lost. They become prey.

Individuals living under a stop-and-frisk regime lack the grounded, liberatory elements of a safe, secure home--they live a condition of out-of-placeness. Geographers distinguish between "places," which are defined by the social process of meaning-making, and "spaces," which by contrast remain "blank" (Cresswell 2013, 1895). This distinction renders power more visible as it "shows how place is used in the construction of ideas about who and what belongs where and when and thus in the construction of those seen as 'deviant' and outside of 'normal' society'" (ibid.). The construction of the default person in a highly surveilled neighborhood as suspicious or fit for stop-and-frisk categorizes some individuals as not properly located; they become marked for intervention. Here, the police presence becomes naturalized while the subject of the stop is constructed as out-of-place. In his articulation of the political consequences of being in- or out-of-place, Cresswell (2013, 1906) argues that the construction of being out-of-place is an indication that that the individual has committed a transgression by violating the "common-sense link between place and the things that go on in it." Stop-and-frisk marks the actions of daily life--standing, talking, walking--as transgressive. And yet, these actions are marked as transgressive within one's home territory, compounding the harm done to the individuals and communities most affected by the coercion of the carceral state.

White Supremacy and the Neoliberal Order

Policing in the stop-and-frisk regime renders all acts of those subject to stop-and-frisk illegitimate, even when the individuals are moving in a place they can rightly call home. The limits of public legitimacy of these incursions is also always racialized in the history of US public policy. Stop-and-frisk functions as both a consequence and a source of the definition of who retains authority over the space in question. Incursions on the individual rights of the home and the home's attendant subject formation are a priori constructed as legitimate under white supremacy. As a result, marginalized bodies that are subject to stop-and-frisk are viewed as always transgressing and always out-of-place. Perry (2011, 86) confronts this out-of-placeness in her discussion of privacy, arguing that surveillance of spaces that the racially oppressed inhabit "is a feature of the practice of inequality" that is "justified through racial narratives about social disorder, invasion, and moral decay." Although Perry focuses on domestic interiors, this surveillance functions on a continuum across space and place; as even private spaces become subject to surveillance, it becomes clear that there is no place for the marked body to exist in a way that is not a "problem" for the oppressive regime.

Perry argues that under this ideology, "the Black or Latino individual should expect to have to prove his rights-worthiness. As such, the distinction between anti-social and law-abiding individuals in the group is collapsed" (ibid., 92). Therefore, there is nothing wrong with peremptory stops, violations of the body, and the creation of a sense of tension and fear for those subjects to the stop-and-frisk regime. Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2012) has likened the prevalence of stop-and-frisk practice in New York City to the slave patrols and policing under the Fugitive Slave Act. In the story that opened this article concerning the football players who were routinely subjected to stop-and-frisk on their walk to and from practice, the helmets carried by the young men functioned as modern-day Freedom Papers. In the eyes of the state, these individuals are not recognized as fully realized citizens without some sort of external accoutrement. The additional impulse of neoliberalism conditions the public sphere for smooth market transactions, naturalizing the construction of legitimate behavior as something other than what these young people--mostly men--are doing. Within this context, the stop-and-frisk regime constructs the policed body as having no possible home.

The subjects under this neoliberal regime gain and retain access to the privileges and benefits of citizenship to the extent that they conform to neoliberal regulation. The regime is neoliberal in that it uses the power of the state to condition capitalist market exchange, but it is white supremacist in that it privileges the forms of market exchange that emerge from a sociocultural orientation of white supremacy within which poor, Black, and Latino individuals--no matter their relation to the market--are always defined as deviant, transgressive, and criminal.

The first characteristic of these neoliberal citizens is that they participate in the market in appropriate ways as determined by capitalist logics. As Brodie (2008, 17) argues, this "new good citizen is one who recognizes the limits and liabilities of state provision and embraces her obligation to work longer and harder in order to become more self-reliant." Similarly, Wacquant (2010, 198) maps the processes by which the subject who functions at the margins is governed, emphasizing what he calls "the paternalist penalization of poverty." Under this schema, those at the margins of the workforce are disciplined through imprisonment and workfare schemes that coercively structure their unruly lives into a semblance of market order. Life becomes increasingly like a smooth business transaction--predictable, efficient, exchange-oriented--when neoliberal citizenship functions.

A key feature of neoliberalism is the naturalization, and thus obscuring, of neoliberal logic as an ideology. As Harcourt (2008) has argued, the idea that the efficient market--and thus the smoothly disciplined market actor--is a natural occurrence is embedded in the core of the neoliberal project. The triumph of a neoliberal order, populated by neoliberal citizens, is posited as a mere return (though a fictional one, as this order has never actually existed) to an order that earlier political and social structures had corrupted.

In the New York stop-and-frisk regime, there are explicitly racialized elements; although these elements are often attributed to "rogue" cops, they appear regularly enough to give the skeptical observer pause. More frequently, racial control is accomplished through implicit judgments about the extent to which a person "fits" or conforms to local expectations (Ray-man 2013). Under the interacting ideologies of neoliberal discipline and post-racial white supremacy, certain bodies--particularly poor, Black, and brown male bodies--are not recognized as "fitting." The fact that stop-and-frisk is not a mere "minor inconvenience or petty indignity" (Terry v. Ohio 1968)--which is how the Supreme Court originally legitimized these stops under the Fourth Amendment--is not recognized, because the subjective experience of these marginalized individuals is excluded from the dominant sociolegal discourse. The intensity and violent nature of the stop-and-frisk regime becomes naturalized as it conditions space through the logic of bourgeois convenience.

However, the neoliberal order does not function equally in all places. In seeking to create ideal venues for actions that foster the expansion of the capitalist order, neoliberal interventions become most aggressive in places that do not conform to market norms. Stop-and-frisk is intensified in those areas that function counter to neoliberal market ideals--the poorest neighborhoods where trade is often limited to black and gray markets, as well as local, non-affiliated retail outlets. One might think of the difficulty big-box stores like Wal-Mart have had in entering urban areas, or of the neglect of such areas by urban specialty stores like Fresh Direct as examples of how certain neighborhoods are not yet conditioned for the smooth market transaction (Mogilyanskaya 2012). As they gentrified, neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem have been less actively targeted by law enforcement, whereas nearby locales like Spanish Harlem and Brownsville remain central hubs of stop-and-frisk enforcement. In these targeted neighborhoods, there are few ways to appear in public in a way that is deemed acceptable, as most public presence is judged deviant and problematic. In these neighborhoods that do not, or at least have yet to, submit to neoliberal discipline, stop-and-frisk functions not as an effective means of increasing public safety, but as part of the disciplinary process.

One might think of the transformation of the Port Authority area as New York's example par excellence of white supremacist neoliberal discipline. A quarter of a century ago, the Port Authority area was characterized by dangerous, illicit transactions with few clear rules; it was visibly disorganized and dominated by the indigent and persons of color, with many people begging or sleeping in public. The "cleaning up" of Port Authority (3)--the rhetoric of cleanliness is an important signifier here--was conducted through various measures of state discipline: the revocation of certain business permits as well as the arrest and harassment of certain unruly bodies. In Port Authority today, signs exhort the legitimate users of public space to not respond to solicitation, mentioning that there are social service workers available to assist anyone truly in need. Now, very few poor people remain visible in Port Authority, even though the numbers of New York City homeless have skyrocketed since the 1980s (Coalition for the Homeless 2014). Neoliberal, white supremacist discipline determines public space as only being accessible to the right (read: white) kind of citizen. The whitening of this space, and many other spaces within Manhattan, is striking.

Across New York City, a post-racial impulse, rather than traditional forms of white supremacy, has emerged. However, it is not as though race no longer mattered; rather, sublimated racial norms persist. The racial order becomes the social order in that the city superficially appears to give equal opportunity to people of all races. Within the stop-and-frisk paradigm, all bodies may be considered out of place, so the policing of white bodies may be similar to the policing of Black and brown bodies. When a white person walks or drives through highly segregated Black or Latino neighborhoods, the stop-and-frisk of this individual is to be expected, because in these spaces the white body is seen as out of place; general law enforcement assumes that a white person in a Black space must be acting in deviant ways--buying drugs or soliciting prostitutes. This sort of illegitimate market behavior is then readily disciplined. Although defenders of stop-and-frisk point to such policing of white bodies as evidence of the practice's lack of a racial bias, the mere fact that the out-of-placeness constructed under neoliberal ideology is not strictly tied to bodies of color does not negate the racism of the overall structure.

To the extent that New York neighborhoods represent a key part of the homeplace for many New Yorkers--particularly for young, poor men of color--stop-and-frisk poses additional challenges for the development of a cohesive subjectivity that maybe empowered to engage in the difficult labor of self-emancipation. At the very least, stop-and-frisk denies the emerging subject the feeling of home-ness that Toni Morrison described as being free from fear--even without a lamp to light a dark path. This idea of constant fear does not imply that the targets of stop-and-frisk are not resisting in their everyday lives--by insisting on the right to move, settle, and be in the spaces claimed as home--but it does point to a particular way that the state is expanding carceral power against democratic subjectivities in everyday life.

Conclusion

Stop-and-frisk represents merely a small feature of the large mass that is the new carceral state. As such, the analysis presented here, which is concerned with local, experiential effects, gestures toward matters that are relevant across the carceral landscape. However, it is in these small, immediate interactions that the lived realities of carcerality can be witnessed. Mass incarceration ought to be resisted because it carries with it real and immediate harms both to the development of human personality and to the possibility for individual and collective liberation. When Ray Kelly (2013) insists that, were he a young man of color in Brownsvillle, he would be a supporter of stop-and-frisk, one sees either mendacity or the predominance of an ideology that makes empathy impossible: Kelly is unable to imagine himself as one of these young men; he cannot feel what they feel, even though their feelings are widely documented and expressed.

In addition to acting as a microcosm of carcerality, stop-and-frisk also represents a special revision of the carceral regime. Foucault (1977) referred to the expansion of disciplinary technology as the creation of a carceral archipelago, and he specifically related this concept to the "ghetto"; however, stop-and-frisk as a "post-racial" policy breaks down the previously articulated boundaries of carcerality. Stop-and-frisk transforms all spaces into spaces that are eligible for surveillance and discipline, drowning the archipelago in the carceral sea. The centralization of the home as a place of identity formation and meaning making emphasizes the material stakes of a world characterized by the new carceral regime.

One thing this article has not accomplished is to fully explore the ways in which these immediate confrontations with white supremacist, neoliberal power may--along with the harm that they inflict--create opportunities for political resistance. In a steadfast commitment to their own subjectivities, the liminal subjects perceive the failure of the dominant culture to recognize them as a site of epistemological violence and one with the potential for physical violence. Although it would of course be preferable if these forms of violence did not happen in the first place, these sites do represent a point of engagement for political struggle. For example, Peart (2011) turned his experience with stop-and-frisk into a critique of police power through both a lawsuit and a widely circulated New York Times article. Through these actions, Peart resists the nullifying effects of stop-and-frisk, enacting instead a political agenda that asserts both the existence of a public subjectivity and his right to it. Similarly, the Morris Justice Project, a participatory action research project, marshalled the resources of the community to produce a unified critique that crossed traditional scholarly boundaries, amplifying the knowledge and voices of individuals living in the South Bronx under the stop-and-frisk regime (Public Science Project 2013).

In stop-and-frisk, the quotidian saturation of white supremacy and neoliberal order is rendered visible. Even in policing that claims to be rational and race neutral, both racial and class inequality are acted out in the homes of New York City's neighborhoods and on the bodies that inhabit those spaces. The neoliberal ideal marks the poor neighborhood as problematic; racism identifies the Black and brown body as embodying that problem.

In reclaiming a homeplace, denizens of the stop-and-frisk regime insist on recognition, citizenship, and the right to know that they are not prey. As a respondent from the Morris Justice Project stated: "This is our home. We have a right to stand, talk, play, and be in our neighborhood."

NOTES

(1.) The Morris Justice Project Report detailed specific names that individuals had been called during stop-and-frisks including: b#@ch, animal, dirty sp#c, crackhead, f@ggot, f%#king Dominican immigrant, stupid n#&ga, homo, and black wh#re (censoring in the original report). Fifty percent of respondents reported that they had been asked for ID just outside their home. In Ailsa Chang's (2011a) report, one interviewee, describing an aggressive stop, commented that "It makes me feel hopeless, basically, that they could just get away with stuff.... I feel completely powerless because it doesn't matter--it's up to them."

(2.) It is crucial to note that the current controversy surrounding stop-and-frisk is merely the latest in a long-standing set of negotiations surrounding the limits of policing without probable cause. These issues date back to Terry v. Ohio (1968), the court case that sanctioned warrantless searches assuming the officers had "probable cause." Since this Supreme Court decision, debates over the constitutional powers of the police against those who are legally considered innocent have continued.

(3.) The transformation of Port Authority is just one example in the overhaul of New York's public spaces between the mid 1980s and the mid 2010s. It is a complex combination of economic redevelopment plans (the Port Authority bus station was included under the massive Times Square redevelopment plan: see Bagli 2010) and aggressive policing guided by the "broken windows" model. Key elements of this process included an increase in arrests for offenses like prostitution, drug use, and disorderly conduct, in concert with new business investments that brought tourist-friendly retail to the transport hub.

REFERENCES

Allen, John 2015

Home: How Habitat Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.

Bagli, Charles 2010

After 30 Years, Times Square Rebirth Is Complete," The New York Times, December 3. At http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/ nyregion/04square.html.

Baker, AI, Ray Rivera, and Janet Roberts 2010

"Stop and Frisk in Brownsville," The New York Times, July 11. At https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/1247468422062/stop-and-frisk-in-brownsvilk-brooklyn.html.

Baldwin, James 1953

Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Vintage.

Becca, James 2015

"A Look at Stop-and-Frisk Data in Philadelphia, 3 other cities." The Sunlight Foundation, March 2. At www.philly.com/philly/news/A_look_ at_stop-and-frisk_data_in_Philadelphia_3_other_cities.html.

Brodie, Janine 2008

"Putting Gender Back In: Women and Social Policy Reform in Canada." In Gendering the Nation-State: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Yasmeen Abu-Laban, pp. 165-84. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press.

Brown, Claude 1965

Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: Signet.

Chang, Ailsa 2011a

"Alleged Illegal Searches by NYPD Rarely Challenged in Marijuana Cases." WNYC News, April 27. At www.wnyc.org/story/126530-alleged-illegal-searches/.

2011b

"Stop-and-Frisk." WNYC News, April 26. At http://www.wnyc.org/ story/126298-stop-and-frisk/.

Coalition for the Homeless 2014

"Facts about Homelessness." At www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/pages/ basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city-data-and-charts.

Cresswell, Tim 2013

Place: A Short Introduction. New York: John Wiley &. Sons.

Davis, Angela 2011

Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.

Dilts, Andrew 2012

"Incurable Blackness: Criminal Disenfranchisement, Mental Disability, and the White Citizen." Disability Studies Quarterly 32(3). At http:// dsq-sds.org/article/view/3268/3101.

Ellison, Ralph 1952/1995

Invisible Man. New York: Vintage.

Fagan, Jeffrey and Amanda Geller 2010

"Pot as Pretext: Marijuana, Race, and the New Disorder in New York City Street Policing." journal of Empirical Legal Studies 7(4): 591-633.

Febos, Melissa 2011

"Look at Me, I'm Crying." The New York Times, April 20. At http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/look-at-me-im-crying.

Ferrandino, Joseph 2015

"Minority Threat Hypothesis and NYPD Stop and Frisk Policy." Criminal Justice Review 40(2): 209-29.

Fogg-Davis, Heath 2014

"Sex-Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination: An Intersectional Critique." Perspectives on Politics 12(1): 45-60.

Foucault, Michel 1977

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.

Francescani, Chris, Melanie Hicken, and Janet Roberts 2012

"Insight: Under Siege: 'Stop-and-Frisk' Polarizes New York." Renters, July 3. At www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/03/us-usa-newyork-stopandfrisk-idUSBRE86205Q20120703.

Fratello, Jennifer and Andres F. Rengifo 2013

Coming of Age with Stop-and-Frisk: Experiences, Self-Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications. New York: Vera Institute.

Garland, David 2001

The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gepner, Abigail and Daniel Prendergast 2016

"Bratton Blasts Stop-and-Frisk Critics." New York Post, September 12. At http://nypost.com/2016/09/12/bratton-blasts-stop-and-frisk-critics/.

Gilmore, Ruth 2005

"Pierce the Future for Hope." In Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex, edited by Julia Sudbury, pp. 231-54. New York: Routledge.

Gottschalk, Marie 2006

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2015

Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Guenther, Lisa 2013

Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Harcourt, Bernard 2008

"Neoliberal Penality: The Birth of the Natural Order, the Illusion of Free Markets." Working Paper 433, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics.

Hemon, Aleksandar 2011

"Mapping Home." The New Yorker, December 5. At http://www.newyorker.eom/magazine/2011/12/05/mapping-home.

hooks, bell 1990

Homeplace: A Site of Resistance. London: Turnaround.

Kelly, Ray 2013

"NYPD: Guilty of Saving 7,383 Lives." The Wall Street Journal, July 22. At https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324448104578616 333588719320.

Lerman, Amy and Vesla Weaver 2014

Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mogilyanskaya, Alina 2012

"Groceries for the Rich, Diesel Fumes for the 99%. "The Independent, May 2. At http://www.indypendent.org/comment/14290.

Morrison, Toni 2010a

"Home." In The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, pp. 3-12. New York: Random House.

2010b

Paradise. New York: Random House.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran 2012

"Occupied Blackness: Urban Policing and the Inevitability of Stop-and-Frisk." Presentation given at the Confronting the Carceral State II Conference, Hunter College, CUNY, February 4.

Murakawa, Naomi 2014

The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. New York: Oxford University Press.

NYCLU (New York Civil Liberties Union) 2012

"Stop-and-Frisk 2011, "May 12. At www.nyclu.org/files/publications/ NYCLU_2011_Stop-and-Frisk_Report.pdf.

Peart, Nicholas 2011

"Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?" The New York Times, December 7. At www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/young-black-and-frisked-by-the-nypd. html.

Perkinson, Robert 2010

Texas Tough: The Rise of Americas Prison Empire. New York: Macmillan.

Perry, Imani 2011

More Beautiful and Alore Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: NYU Press.

Public Science Project 2013

"A Report from the Morris Justice Project." At http://stopandfriskinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/ll/2013/05/Morris-Justice-Project-Poster.pdf.

Rayman, Graham 2013

"New NYPD Tapes Introduced in Stop and Frisk Trial." Village Voice, March 22. At http://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-nypd-tapes-introduced-in-stop-and-frisk-trial-6721026.

Rosenfeld, Richard and Robert Fornango 2014

"The Impact of Police Stops on Precinct Robbery and Burglary Rates in New York City, 2003-2010." Justice Quarterly 31(1): 96-122.

Thompson, Heather 2010

"Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History." The Journal of American History 97(3): 703-34.

Threadcraft, Shatema 2014

"Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto." Signs 39(3): 735-60.

Wacquant, Loic 2009

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2010

"Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity." Sociological Forum 25(2): 197-220.

Weaver, Vesla 2007

"Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy." Studies in American Political Development 21(2): 230-65.

Weiser, Benjamin and Joseph Goldstein 2014

"Mayor Says New York City Will Settle Suits on Stop-and-Frisk Tactics." The New York Times, January 30. At https://www.nytimes. com/2014/01/31/nyregion/de-blasio-stop-and-frisk.html?_r=0.

Young, Iris Marion 1997

"House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme." In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas in Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy, pp. 134-85. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2005

On Female Body Experience: '"Throwing like a Girl" and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zeidman, Steven 2012

"Whither the Criminal Court: Confronting Stops-And-Frisks." 76 Albany Law Review 1187. At https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2259923.

Zimring, Franklin 2011

The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control. New York: Oxford University Press.

Legal Case Cited

Terry v. Ohio, [1968] 392 U.S. 1.

* WENDY L. WRIGHT (wendy.wright@bridge.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Bridgewater State University, MA. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University in 2013. Her research focuses on political theory in the interpretation and critique of law and policy. She is currently working on the manuscript of her first book, "The Failure of Punishment," which examines the American relationship between the justifications for punishment and the practice of it, specifically focusing on race and critical theory.