New York City police officers made more than 673,000 traffic stops last year, the majority involving Black and Latino motorists. Only 2% of those stops led to arrests, raising the specter of the stop-and-frisk tactics that were ruled unconstitutional a decade ago, reported Bloomberg.
New York Police Department officers also stopped
nearly 15,000 pedestrians — most Black or Latino — in 2022, the highest
number in any year since 2015, according to an
analysis of police department data by the New York branch of the
American Civil Liberties Union. Most were released without any arrest or
citation issued.
“We're very
concerned about a department that's going back to a regime where it's engaging
in very aggressive stop and frisk,” said Christopher Dunn, legal director for
the NYCLU. “It's a program that does very little to produce public safety.”
The numbers are concerning, advocates say, because
such encounters can become violent. Last year 7% of all police killings in
the US began with a traffic stop, according to Mapping Police
Violence. Studies have also shown that frequent encounters with police
can have negative effects on communities’ mental and physical
health and lead to unnecessary interactions with the criminal justice
system. One survey of New York men found that those stopped experienced elevated anxiety and trauma as a result.
This is the first year the NYPD has published vehicle stop data. The department said it is still
analyzing and understanding its traffic stop activity. In a statement, the
NYPD also defended the increase in pedestrian stops, calling it an “essential
tool in helping to reduce violence,” and noting that its officers are expected
to follow department guidelines when carrying them out.
It isn’t just New York. Nationwide, police stop and
search Black people at higher rates than their White counterparts. For
example, in Los Angeles, Black motorists are stopped at a rate of 32 per 100,
compared with 11 per 100 for White drivers, according to a Stanford
University analysis of 200 million traffic stops. However,
those searches aren’t more likely to turn up contraband, research shows.
Those disparities are clear in the New York City
data for both vehicle and pedestrian stops, raising “red flags” about
racial profiling, Dunn said. “Police officers can pretty much stop anyone for
any reason,” Dunn added. “That opens the door to racial profiling.”
In New York City, pedestrian stops last year
increased 61% over the previous year, according to the NYCLU analysis. NYPD
guidelines ask officers to report formal stops, which occur when
there is suspicion that a crime was committed or is in progress, regardless of
outcome. The department is also required to publish that data publicly, a
reform that came after four plainclothes NYPD officers shot and killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Black man, in 1999.
Almost 90% of the pedestrians stopped by NYPD
officers in 2022 were Black or Latino, and in more than two-thirds of the
encounters the person was let go without arrest or a ticket, according to
the NYCLU
data. There are likely more pedestrian stops than the data show, since
officers don’t always record encounters, Dunn said.
Stop-and-frisk, as practiced by the NYPD
during the administration of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was ruled
unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013, who found that the way the
department deployed the tactic was racially biased. That ruling didn’t bar its
use, but required the department to create and follow guidelines for
stops. The former mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg
News parent Bloomberg LP.
The number of stops in the city has dropped
substantially since the court ruling, from a high of 685,000 pedestrian stops
in 2011. But the 2022 figures represent a reversal of that trend.
“The numbers are really astonishing,” Dunn said.
“We're talking about 675,000 vehicle stops, almost the same number of stops as
the highest point of pedestrian stop and frisk.”
The NYPD pointed to a 22% increase in major felony crimes and a 26% jump in low-level infractions in 2022 as part of the reason for the uptick in stops. However, the stop data show that in 2022 the outcomes of the stops increasingly resulted individuals being let go. In the last quarter of the year, 67.4% of stops resulted in a person being released with no enforcement action taken, the highest level since 2019.
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