Abstract
While criminal law scholar Michelle Alexander has shown that stop and frisks often serve as the gateway into the criminal justice system for young men of color, she occludes the complex forces that led to their rise." This article seeks to identify those forces, relating the rise of stop and frisk rules to liberal politics, Cold War concerns, and spatial dynamics. To illustrate, this article will proceed in three parts. Part I will demonstrate how Mapp v. Ohio coincided with judicial frustration at police intrusions into private, intimate space-including private thought-precisely at a time when the United States sought to distinguish itself from totalitarian "thought control" regimes during the Cold War. Part II will show how the Court's effort to prevent thought control and guard intimate space in Mapp engendered an unanticipated public effect, leading police both to lie about arrests and to use more violent means for procuring evidence from suspects on the street." Finally, Part III will show how such street-level tensions played out at the local and national levels, interiorizing liberty in ways that allowed for a narrative of expanding freedoms amidst a climate of increased police control."
Recommended Citation
Anders Walker,
"To Corral and Control The Ghetto": Stop, Frisk, and the Geography of Freedom,
48
U. Rich. L. Rev.
1223
(2014).
Available at:
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/lawreview/vol48/iss4/5