A dozen years ago, a federal judge ruled the NYPD69ýs practice of stopping, questioning and frisking New Yorkers by the hundreds of thousands to be unconstitutional 69ý as the vast majority of stops, overwhelmingly of young Black and Brown men, weren69ýt based on sufficient individualized suspicion.
The 23rd 69ý count 69ýem 69ý report of the court-appointed independent monitor is out, and reveals that even as the city69ýs police have made great strides, they69ýve got a fair distance yet to travel.
When the court struck down the city69ýs stop-and-frisk practices, we like many others howled that it would deal a serious blow to New York69ýs efforts to keep driving down violent crime. We said then that 69ýoutrageously predictable, dangerously misguided ruling69ý was a 69ý195-page scream of self-righteous ideology.69ý The decision, we wrote, 69ýthreatens to push the city back toward the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed.69ý
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 we69ýd been wrong, writing: 69ýNew York is safer while friction between the NYPD and the city69ýs minority communities has eased.69ý
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 69ý and the Constitution69ýs Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures 69ý 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 69ý 95% of stops were of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, and 97% were of men 69ý but it69ýs 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 cops69ý reports.
