NYPD Still Routinely Violating Rights With Its Stop-And-Frisk Program
The NYPD is proving it's impossible to fix an entity that doesn't want to improve. It has engaged in more than a decade of straight-up ignoring court-ordered reforms of its stop-and-frisk program. The program's original form was declared unconstitutional in 2013. Since then, it has only marginally improved. And much of that improvement is probably an illusion created by officers' flat-out refusal to generate court-ordered documentation of stops/frisks.
Even though the number of (documented) stops has dropped precipitously since their pre-2013 highs, the stops haven't improved in quality. An investigation into stop-and-frisk data revealed that the program had somehow become even more racist over the years under federal supervision.
Just 5% of [stopped pedestrians] were white, revealing racial disparities even starker than at the height of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stop and frisk" era.
A year later, the federal monitor released its report on the stop-and-frisk program, revealing that the frisks were straying progressively further from the reasonable suspicion" baseline, tumbling from 94% in 2020 to 63% by the second quarter of 2023. What this indicates is that officers are realizing nothing's going to happen to them if they break the rules, even while under federal oversight. The longer they do what they want without any recrimination, the more comfortable they become with breaking the rules more frequently.
A little more than six months later and another report on the stop-and-frisk program brings more of the same bad news. The NYPD can't be fixed because it doesn't want to be fixed and apparently no other entity has the power (or the willpower) to force the department to fully comply with the court-ordered reforms or even the Constitution itself.
Police Department anti-crime units stopped, frisked and searched too many New Yorkers unlawfully in 2023 - and at levels that far outstripped those of regular patrol units, according to a new report from a court-appointed monitor.
The monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein, filed a report in federal court in Manhattan on Monday that found that the units, the Neighborhood Safety Teams and Public Safety Teams, made unlawful stops at least a quarter of the time in 2023. And despite the volume of unlawful stops, the report found, command-level supervisors habitually failed to identify or address them.
Sadly, this is exactly the expected outcome of these reform efforts. The NYPD has been blowing off its oversight for more than a decade. And it still has the gall to claim it's been doing its damnedest to improve.
In a statement Monday, the Police Department said: We appreciate the monitor's report and look forward to reviewing it. As the report notes, this data is from 2023 and the N.Y.P.D. has taken affirmative steps since then to address many of these issues."
The federal monitor agrees with this response by the NYPD. Indeed, things have improved since January 2024, which would be eleven years after a federal court began issuing reform mandates. If I were one of the steadily-stymied federal overseers, I wouldn't bother to dignify this minor improvement with a response.
The problems with regular patrol officers likely continue. This report deals specifically with the NYPD's Neighborhood Safety Teams," which sound a whole lot like rogue units operating under completely different rules and even less oversight than regular patrol officers. In fact, these teams were so problematic they were disbanded by Mayor Bill de Blasio when he was in office. Current mayor Eric Adams (who is currently the target of a federal investigation) revived them in 2022 and they apparently went right back to the important work of violating people's rights.
Neighborhood Safety Team officers had a legal basis for making stops only 75 percent of the time, 17 percentage points lower than their counterparts in patrol units, the report found.
The rates of abuse for frisks and searches were even more troubling: Only 58 percent of frisks were deemed lawful, constituting a 15-percentage-point drop since the previous audit, the report said, and only 54 percent of searches were lawful, a nine-point decrease.
Eighty-nine percent of the people stopped were Black or Hispanic men, the report found.
The federal monitor's statement drills down to the root of the problem.
They have all the tools," Ms. Denerstein said. What they lack is accountability..."
That's exactly it. You can have all the mandates and documentation in the world, but if the NYPD leadership (and I'm using that term oh-so-very loosely) doesn't want things to change, all it has to do is nothing at all.