NYPD’s Stop And Frisk Program Still Limping Along, More Biased Than Ever

Legal Issues

from the less-frequent-but-more-terrible dept

It’s been a decade since a federal court declared the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program (mostly) illegal. Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a 195-page decision, pointed out everything that was wrong with the program, which ignored the “Terry stop” parameters defined by the Supreme Court in its 1968 decision to engage in stops of anyone at any time, often accompanied by a “frisk” of the person in hopes of feeling up contraband.

Reasonable suspicion of recent criminal activity was the baseline set by the Supreme Court. The NYPD’s baseline was lower. For the most part, stops/frisks were supported by the reasonable suspicion that the target was a minority moving around in public.

Since that 2013 decision, the NYPD has failed (read: refused) to abide by the fixes proscribed by the federal court. Instead, it has spent the past decade either ignoring the specifics of court-ordered corrective actions or shifting its enforcement efforts to do pretty much the same thing (stop minorities and hassle them) without raising the hackles of its federal oversight.

It’s not all bad news. Stop-and-frisk numbers continue to decline precipitously since their all-time highs prior to the federal court decision in 2013. But it’s not all good, either. As NYC-focused site Gothamist explains (using data obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union), stops are way down, but the racial bias may be worse than ever.

Police officers reported stopping 8,502 pedestrians in the first half of 2023 – a dramatic drop from the stop and frisk heights of 2011 when police made nearly 700,000 pedestrian stops.

That’s an amazing decrease… in stops, anyway. But the bias that prompted a federal court to order the end of stop-and-frisk as the NYPD preferred to deploy it is still there. Just because it’s happening less often doesn’t mean it’s happening less frequently.

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 decade on and all NYC residents have is a more finely tuned instrument of racial oppression. This was inadvertently confirmed by the NYPD in its statement to Gothamist.

An NYPD spokesperson said the department does not direct officers to make a certain number of stops, but that police make stops “with increasing levels of precision” based on officers’ observations. 

Presumably, this means officers are now capable of detecting whether someone is both black and ambulatory, whereas prior to the reformation of stop-and-frisk, officers just had to guess. The spokesperson calls this 95% non-white targeting “precision.” The NYPD’s data says otherwise:

Of the 7,000 Black and Latino pedestrians the NYPD reported stopping this year, roughly 72% were deemed “innocent.”

Being wrong nearly three-quarters of the time should be no one’s definition of “precision.” And the fact that stops/frisks of white people resulted in a 40% arrest rate doesn’t make things any better or demonstrate the NYPD is just as willing to target Caucasians.

In fact, it shows the opposite of what the NYPD would like it to show or what its spokesperson says the stats show. If 40% of stopped white people are arrested, it simply means NYPD officers are far more careful in their reasonable suspicion calculations when dealing with whites. It’s easier to hassle minorities, which tends to result in a lower hit rate. It’s a bit tougher to deal with people who treat 911 like a customer service line. And if you’re more careful about approaching white people, it stands to reason you’ll only approach those who are practically dripping with suspicion.

And these stats — as damning as they are in this form — are likely even worse than they appear here.

[NYCLU legal director Chris] Dunn estimated that police are making two to three times as many stops as they say under Adams’ public safety strategy, but don’t document unwarranted stops that don’t result in a summons or arrest.

So, these stops are likely under-reported. And biased policing efforts have moved to areas where reasonable suspicion is still the baseline but has yet to be the target of federal court orders and DOJ monitoring. As Gothamist reports, the in-person stops/frisks have largely been replaced by traffic stops. The NYPD performed nearly 670,000 of these last year. Bias-on-foot has been replaced with bias-on-wheels.

About 90% of the drivers searched or arrested were Black or Latino.

Biased policing is still alive and well at the NYPD. It’s just a bit less likely to draw the attention of its federal oversight.

Filed Under: civil liberties, eric adams, nypd, stop and frisk