Editorial: The NYPD's long learning curve — Slowly getting better on stop, question, frisk

Yahoo

07-02-2025

A dozen years ago, a federal judge ruled the NYPD's practice of stopping, questioning and frisking New Yorkers by the hundreds of thousands to be unconstitutional — as the vast majority of stops, overwhelmingly of young Black and Brown men, weren't based on sufficient individualized suspicion.
The 23rd — count 'em — report of the court-appointed independent monitor is out, and reveals that even as the city's police have made great strides, they've got a fair distance yet to travel.
When the court struck down the city's stop-and-frisk practices, we like many others howled that it would deal a serious blow to New York's efforts to keep driving down violent crime. We said then that 'outrageously predictable, dangerously misguided ruling' was a '195-page scream of self-righteous ideology.' The decision, we wrote, 'threatens to push the city back toward the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed.'
Three years later, we saw crime continuing to decline despite massive dialing back of stop-and-frisks (from nearly 700,000 in 2011 to 12,000 in 2016) and admitted that we'd been wrong, writing: 'New York is safer while friction between the NYPD and the city's minority communities has eased.' While an important tool in the toolbox, stop, question and frisk clearly had been overused, and abused.
Fast forward to today. The latest data available, for 2023, puts the annual stop-and-frisk total at about 16,000, higher than recent lows but way, way, way lower than under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly.
This new report by independent monitor Mylan Denerstein drills down to review a sample of some 400 recent stops to determine whether they conformed to constitutional standards. The answer: mostly, but not often enough. While nearly 92% of stops by patrol cops passed muster, just 75% of those by Neighborhood Safety Teams were.
The video player is currently playing an ad. The numbers were still lower, just 64%, for Public Safety Teams. Those NSTs and PSTs are specialized units created in recent years to combat gun violence. NSTs replaced Anti-Crime Units, who had been radioactive in some circles; PSTs are proactive enforcement units charged with addressing both violent crime and quality-of-life problems.
The share of frisks and fuller searches complying with the ruling — and the Constitution's Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures — were lower than the stop numbers. Just 58% of NST frisks and 64% of NST searches were lawful, according to the monitor, failing grades well below the A- rate of 89% that patrol cops hit.
(Major racial disparities remain — 95% of stops were of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, and 97% were of men — but it's not clear how out-of-whack this is with reports of related criminal activity.)
Perhaps the biggest problems are that supervisors approved as lawful 99% of stops, frisks and searches, frequently rubber-stamping behavior that clearly failed to comply with the rules. Indeed, when there was body-worn camera footage to scrutinize, it frequently contradicted those cops' reports. Relatedly, officers frequently justified stops using standard language that strongly suggests they weren't driven by individualized suspicion.
Denerstein urges better supervisory reviews; better training; and a stronger system for monitoring cops' compliance, or lack thereof, with the rules. Amen on all counts.
We're all for proactive policing. But public trust is a plant to be tended to every day, every season, every year.
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