NEW YORK — The New York City tactic known as “stop and frisk” o “stop and frisk“, which is part of a new initiative to combat gun violence, is hurting communities of color and breaking the law, a court-appointed federal monitor said Monday.
Monitor Mylan Denerstein said NYPD Neighborhood Safety Teams, special units deployed over the past 14 months to seize firearms in high-crime areas, were engaging in “unconstitutional surveillance” by stopping and frisking too many people without justification.
At a police precinct, Denerstein said, only 41 percent of stops, 32 percent of pat-downs and 26 percent of searches were legal.
A replacement for the crime-fighting units the NYPD disbanded in 2021, Neighborhood Safety Squads operate in 34 areas accounting for 80% of the city’s violent crime, mostly communities of color. Of the people the teams have apprehended, Denerstein said, 97% are black or Hispanic.
A spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams said city officials “have serious concerns” with Denerstein’s methodology and only learned of his findings after they were reported in the media.
The spokesman, Fabien Levy, said shootings have decreased since the Neighborhood Safety Teams were created.
Officers assigned to the units “have enhanced training and supervision to ensure that we not only keep New Yorkers safe, but also protect their civil liberties,” Levy said, adding that “any unconstitutional detention is unacceptable and we will strive to do better for New Yorkers every day.”
Denerstein said he began his review after Adams announced in March 2022 that the NYPD was deploying Neighborhood Safety Teams to some precincts to combat gun violence. Wearing modified uniforms and driving unmarked cars, team members perform stop, frisking and searches in their assigned neighborhoods.
“Unfortunately, the results are disappointing,” Denerstein wrote.
Despite their training and experience, officers assigned to Neighborhood Safety Teams “in general appear to be stopping, frisking and searching people with an unsatisfactory level of compliance. Too many people are illegally stopped, frisked and searched.”
In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the NYPD had violated the civil rights of black and Hispanic New Yorkers with stop-and-frisk, which was part of an effort to get guns and drugs off the streets by stopping and Frequently searching people on the street.
United States District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the stops were a form of indirect racial profiling. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, once a champion of the tactic, has since apologized for its use.
Since the ruling, the department has claimed a sharp drop in stops, reporting an average of about 11,730 per year between 2016 and 2022, compared with a peak of nearly 686,000 stops in 2011.
Black and Hispanic people continue to be the targets of the vast majority of stops, accounting for 89% of all stops in 2022, according to NYPD data compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
2023-06-06 14:28:05
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