Stop and Frisk by the Numbers
In 2013 a federal court ordered the New York City Police Department to enforce a policy requiring officers to document every stop and frisk interaction. According to the latest report by a court-appointed monitor, the department has yet to comply.
At a public hearing in Midtown Manhattan on May 26th, 1999, Eric Adams, a 38-year-old lieutenant in the New York City Police Department (NYPD), told the United States Commission on Civil Rights that police used “stop-and-frisk” tactics to harass minorities and didn’t report all the stops they made. Adams told commissioners that the stops, which involve invasive actions like patting people down, checking waistbands, and searching through pockets, were written up only about “one out of 30” times.
The NYPD leadership disputed Adams’ testimony, saying there was no evidence to support his claim and that there was “no legal or Department requirement for officers to fill out a stop-and-frisk form for many stops.” Two commission members faulted the Commission’s final report for an “over-reliance on anecdotal testimony.”
Adams, whose activism earned him a reputation as a rebel cop, will soon likely have the opportunity to address the problem directly, because in January he is all but certain to be sworn in as New York’s next mayor.
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The civil rights commission had come to New York that year to investigate “ugly episodes of police misconduct,” referring to “highly publicized tragedies involving Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo.” Two months earlier, on March 25, a Bronx grand jury indicted four police officers for murder in the killing of Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant who was shot 19 times. On May 25, just the day before the hearing, an officer pleaded guilty to federal civil rights violations in the 1997 case of Louima, a Haitian immigrant sodomized with a wooden handle in a Brooklyn police station.
Diallo was a 22-year-old street vendor killed by members of the city’s Street Crime Unit (SCU). The plainclothes officers, on the lookout for the perpetrator of a series of neighborhood crimes, stopped Diallo outside his Bronx apartment building one night in February 1999. According to reports, Diallo reached for his wallet. The police say they thought he was reaching for a gun and fired 41 shots at Diallo.
In the following weeks and months, the killing set off a series of protests and investigations. At a March 3 demonstration, more than 1,000 people blocked traffic on Wall Street. The following week, demonstrators began to hold daily rallies in front of NYPD headquarters in which stars and politicians were arrested.
The outrage and investigations zeroed in one the most visible and controversial aspects of aggressive law enforcement strategies the city adopted in the early 1990’s in response to record crime rates; stopping citizens on the streets and searching them for weapons.
On March 8, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a federal class action lawsuit targeting the SCU and the City’s stop-and-frisk practices. Daniels v City of New York charged that police stopped and frisked people “without reasonable suspicion and on the basis of race and national origin.”
On March 18, a week before the indictments in the Diallo case, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer opened an investigation “in response to deep public concerns about the impact of ‘stop & frisk’ tactics upon minority communities and individuals in New York City.”
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It is legal in America for police to stop someone if the officer has a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. And if an officer believes the suspect is armed, it is legal to frisk the person. It’s known as a “Terry stop,” after 1968 Supreme Court decision. *The theory is that it is proper for a police officer to stop a suspicious character, and that it’s in the interests of safety to allow the officer to frisk the suspect if he or she has reason to think the suspect may be armed.
But the NYPD, according to critics, was abusing the practice to the point where “hundreds of thousands of people, mostly minorities, have been stopped for no legitimate reason — or worse, because of the color of their skin,” as a New York Times editorial put it.
“The evolution of the relatively modest Terry stop into a core NYPD crime-fighting strategy” began in response to “an epic crime wave that crested in New York City in the early 1990s,” says Jeffrey Bellin, an Associate Professor at William & Mary Law School.
In 1990, New York City reported a record 2,262 murders, an average of six murders a day. City officials reckoned that the answer was to get guns off the streets. Thus began, says Bellin, the “citywide efforts of thousands of NYPD officers to routinely stop and frisk pedestrians for the purpose of finding guns and discouraging gun carrying.” According to Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan, “stop-and-frisk actions became the primary method for removing illegal handguns from the street.”
This may not have been what Attorney General Janet Reno had in mind when she promoted the NYPD’s Police Strategy №1: Getting Guns off the Streets of New York in her 1999 report, “Promising Strategies to Reduce Gun Violence.”
The NYPD quadrupled the number of officers assigned to elite squads tasked with “aggressively enforce all gun laws,” the Special Crime Units (SCU). Their motto was “We Own the Night,” wrote Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute. “The modus operandi of the unit was to quickly swarm on a person, with pistols drawn, all the while barking commands laced with vulgarities.” And on the night of February 4, 1999, 4 members of a Bronx SCU killed Amadou Diallo.
“The killing of Amadou Diallo was neither an act of racist violence nor some fluke accident. It was the worst-case scenario of a dangerous and reckless style of policing,” wrote Lynch.
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Janet Reno included New York’s anti-crime program in the “Promising Strategies to Reduce Gun Violence” report because it seemed to work. Murders in the city went from more than 2,200 in 1990 to fewer than 500 in 2020. There is debate over what effects the NYPD’s aggressive policies — including stop-and-frisk — had on the steep decline of crime in the city. But the verdict is in on how its officers had been abusing Terry stops. The courts have repeatedly ruled it violated the fourth and 14th amendments. And courts have repeatedly ordered reforms.
Practically everyone involved — including the NYPD — has agreed that stop-and-frisk practices cannot be reformed unless officers document and report each and every incident. According to Department policy, and officer is required to fill out a form called a U-250 every time they stop a person to investigate suspicious behavior.
And that may be the biggest challenge that Mayor Adams will face in correcting the problem that Police Lieutenant Adams called out 22 years ago at the Civil Rights Commission hearing. The Commission ultimately concluded in its report published in August 2000 that NYPD officers “routinely fail to file the required paperwork after stopping and frisking people on the streets of the city.”
Civil rights advocates “have been organizing and litigating against NYPD stop and frisk and racial profiling for over 20 years,” said Monifa Bandele of Communities United for Police Reform. “This has been a decades-long battle and the origins of this Floyd lawsuit go back to 1999 after the NYPD gunned down Amadou Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets.”
The origins Bandele refers to is the Daniels lawsuit filed in that tension-filled month of March, 1999 before the Civil Rights Commission came to town. A central aim of that lawsuit was to get a court order requiring the NYPD “to institute and implement appropriate measures to ensure compliance with departmental directives that SCU officers complete UF–250’s on each and every stop and frisk they conduct.”
In the aftermath of the Louima and Diallo incidents, when the public seemed supportive of reforms, the plaintiffs in the Daniels case had cause to be confident of being granted such an order, along with other remedies. However, public sentiment shifted dramatically in favor of law enforcement after September 11, 2001.
Daniels V. NYC was settled in 2003, with the stipulation that the “NYPD shall continue its requirements that all NYPD officers document stop, question and frisk activity.” But the Defendants did not admit any wrongdoing, nor did the court appoint any monitor to oversee compliance.
As ordered, the NYPD produced the data on stop-and-frisk to Center for Constitutional Rights through 2007.
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“There were a lot of problems with that settlement,” Darius Charney, CCR Senior Staff Attorney later said at a panel discussion, “but one of the good things that came out of it was getting a hold of the stop-and-frisk data. When we analyzed it and saw that the problem was getting worse, we felt that we needed to go back to court.”
And they did. On December 21, 2007, Charney went before the original judge in the Daniels case and asked her to find the NYPD in violation of her court orders. Instead, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York directed him to file a new lawsuit.
Five weeks later, on Jan 31, 2008, the CCR filed Floyd v. City of New York. David Floyd was one of four New York men who had been stopped and frisked, the lead plaintiffs in a class-action. The case went to trial in March, 2013.
On August 12th, 2013 Judge Scheindlin ruled in favor of the CCR, asserting that the NYPD “acted with deliberate indifference to constitutional deprivations,” noting that “officers do not prepare a UF-250 for every stop they make.”
Noting “significant deficiencies in record keeping practices in virtually every precinct throughout the City,” Scheindlin ordered police officers “to record stop and frisk activity in memo books, otherwise known as activity logs.”
The fact that New York City police officers were required by policy — and court order — to document and report each and every stop-and-frisk is repeated over and again, year after year, in court filings, reports, and investigations.
In November 2013, the New York State Attorney General released a report on stop-and-frisk stating that “officers often underreported the stops. In roughly a fifth of investigated stop-and-frisk-related complaints in 2012, officers failed to fill out the required UF-250 form.”
The court appointed a special monitor to oversee the city’s compliance with its orders in Floyd v New York. Since its first dispatch in 2015, the monitor has consistently reported two things:
- The city cannot comply with court-ordered reforms if officers don’t report every stop.
- Officers are not reporting every stop.
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In 2015, the monitor, attorney Peter Zimroth, reported to the Court that “the data being reported may not be entirely accurate because some officers are making stops without appropriately documenting them,” adding that “the NYPD recognizes that undocumented stops are a serious issue and that more work needs to be done to determine the extent of the problem and ensure proper recordkeeping.”
Zimroth pledged that “the monitor team will have continued involvement in this matter,” because “the integrity of the data being reported by the Department is essential to its credibility and therefore its proper functioning in a democratic society.” The police put out a statement saying “It is of utmost importance to the N.Y.P.D. and the public that all stops are properly documented.”
In 2016, Zimroth reiterated that “the issue of underreporting needs to be addressed and fixed.” He discussed the new forms, policies and procedures put in place to address the problem.
A 2017 report is filled with charts and graphs, along with Zimroth’s comment that “there are always multiple ways to slice and dice data.” Also, while the monitor perceived “some positive changes in organizational culture driven by the police commissioner and others in leadership roles… there continues to be an issue of underreporting… officers continue to fail to document stops.”
Another court-appointed overseer wrote in 2018 about focus group meetings in which “NYPD sergeants and lieutenants pointed to a concern that stops were being conducted, but not documented, [P168]” adding that “leadership executives highlighted that for oversight functions to be productive, it is critical that all police-citizen encounters be documented. [P189]”
The following year, in January 2019, Zimroth informed the Court that “officers still are not completing stop reports when required.” Two months later, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) seconded that opinion. Mayor DeBlasio had been touting his success in reducing the yearly number of stop-and-frisks. The number had peaked at almost 700,000 during the Bloomberg administration, but then dropped to about 10,000 under the new Mayor. But the NYCLU wasn’t totally buying it, saying “the actual number of stops is considerably higher because officers are failing to document many stops.”
In January 2020, the new decade dawned with Zimroth pointing out that he has “consistently raised concerns about stops not being reported, and the NYPD agrees that there are more stops than are being reported.” [Page 3] The October 2020 report offered more of the same. “Any assessment of compliance with the Court’s remedial orders will be impossible unless the Department finds ways to ensure that unreported stops are no longer an issue. If the NYPD’s data is not accurate and complete, the Monitor cannot find that the City is in substantial compliance.”
Also in the October 2020 report, Zimroth informed the Court that his monitoring team was considering trying out new analyses of stop-and-frisk data to get a handle on whether there were racial disparities in the way police were implementing the practice. (The court had already concluded that indeed there were racial disparities, and had appointed Zimroth to help remedy the situation.)
The monitor would have to delay any new analyzing, however, because “significant underreporting would undermine the conclusions of these analyses” and so they would have to wait until that problem was fixed. P21
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Meanwhile, at One Police Plaza, down by City Hall where all the big protests took place back in 1999, activists were losing patience. On July 29, 2021, they held a rally calling for better oversight and enforcement.
“It’s been eight years since the landmark Floyd ruling and there have been zero disciplinary reforms to date,” organizers said in a press release. “We’re not interested in litigating this for another 20 years.”
They announced that Darius Charney filed a motion to amend the monitorship overseeing the Floyd court orders. They want the court to create a Community Collaborative Board to “advise and provide stakeholder input to the court and the monitor on the NYPD’s progress in implementing the court-ordered reforms.”
The activists complained that about the “NYPD’s incomplete stop-and-frisk data.” They weren’t happy with Zimroth’s oversight or the “compliance metrics” in his “voluminous, highly technical” status reports.
They may have been referring to sections like this in the monitor’s report of the previous November:
“Cronbach’s alpha metric was used to measure the internal consistency of the observed items that comprised the latent outcome variables. Alpha coefficients range from zero to one with high values suggesting increased measurement reliability… Confirmatory factor analysis showed that survey items representing outcome measures had strong intra-item correlations…”
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When Zimroth released his latest report about a month later, on September 1, there were no surprises regarding stop-and-frisk data.
“To assess the Department’s compliance with its racial profiling policies and the Fourteenth Amendment, we use several statistical analyses of NYPD’s stop and frisk data, conducted by the experts on my monitor team,” he writes.
Alas, “as noted in prior Monitor reports, NYPD officers are not documenting all stops, and underreporting of stops limits the reliability of analyses… Without complete data on stops, the NYPD will not be able to demonstrate, and I will not be able to inform the Court, that the NYPD is in substantial compliance with the Court’s remedial order.”
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So, if and when Eric Adams is sworn in as the Mayor of New York City, many things will have changed about policing in New York City since he testified before the civil rights commission about the problem of underreport stop-and-frisk incidents — but that won’t be one of them.
Adams says he wants to bring back a version of the infamous Street Crimes Unit, the notorious face of 1990’s New York police violence. Even so, one person who will be rooting for Adams to succeed in reforming the department will be Abner Louima, who endorsed Adams in his run for mayor.
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