PROTOCOL: Police stops to reduce crime: A systematic review

The use of pedestrian stops has been one of the most common yet controversial proactive strategies in modern policing (Weisburd & Majmundar, 2018). The pedestrian stop (also known as stop and frisk, Terry stops, street pops, stop and search, street stops, etc.) is often defined as the process by which “…officers stop, and potentially question and search, people in the communities they are patrolling” (Lachman et al., 2012, p. 1). These tactics have been staples in policing for generations, but they gained legitimacy with the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Terry v. Ohio (1968)—which allows police officers discretion to conduct an investigatory stop of a person given reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime or is in the process of committing a crime, and discretion to frisk (or pat-down) the person given reasonable suspicion that they are carrying a weapon (see Jones-Brown et al., 2010).