STOP AND FRISK NEW YORK: News Excerpts

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“It is simply fantastic to urge that a [stop and frisk] procedure performed in public by a policeman while the citizen stands helpless, perhaps facing a wall with his hands raised, is a ‘petty indignity.’  It is a serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person, which may inflict great indignity and arouse strong resentment, and it is not to be undertaken lightly…. Even a limited search of the outer clothing for weapons constitutes a severe, though brief, intrusion upon cherished personal security, and it must surely be an annoying, frightening, and perhaps humiliating experience.”   

– Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Terry v. Ohio, 1968

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In 2011, the New York Police Department made nearly 700,000 recorded stop and frisks where police officers filled out what the NYPD calls "UF-250" forms. At the same time, the police department also made an unknown number of stops, frisks and searches, possibly hundreds of thousands more, in which UF-250 forms were not filled out. The numbers of reported and unreported stop and frisks have been increasing since the 1990s prompting multiple lawsuits, an investigation and report by the NY state attorney general, protests, lengthy academic and research studies, strongly critical newspaper  columns, and many news stories. Yet they go on, increasing nearly every year, targeting mainly teenagers and young men, nearly 90% of whom are blacks and Latinos.

The marijuana possession arrests are a byproduct of the stop and frisks. As the following excerpts note in passing, the stops often include a search of the person's clothing and possessions. Although it is rarely discussed, most such searches inside of pockets, clothing and possessions are illegal and unconstitutional.  

EXCERPTS FROM MAJOR NEWS STORIES AND COMMENTARY ABOUT
NEW YORK CITY'S ENORMOUS STOP AND FRISK CAMPAIGN.

New York has a moral imperative to address violence. But stop-and-frisk practices are harming the community in order to protect it, and the costs of those practices can no longer be justified by the claim that nothing else will work. There are other ways.

Representatives of the New York Civil Liberties Union and other officials gathered at the steps of City Hall Tuesday to criticize the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy, which reached record heights in 2011 according to a recent report.

Officials at the New York City Police Department say last year, police officers officially recorded over 684,000 stop and frisks—a 14 percent increase from the year before....

"Innocent New Yorkers who on 600,000 separate occasions this past year were stopped, frisked and maybe thrown up against the wall. Barely six percent of these terrorizing encounters resulted in arrest," said Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYPD says last year, blacks were 53 percent of the stop subjects, Hispanics were 34 percent, and whites made up 9 percent of those stopped....

Activists warn that sort of policing turns black and Latino communities against the NYPD. "How dare anyone say these policies are good for our neighborhoods when we are telling you that they are not," said City Councilman Jumaane Williams. They say there's a better way for police to work with the community.

"If you have a professional police force that is interacting in a professional and respectful way,” said Michael Harding, an attorney at the National Action Network, “you are going to have more people participating in gun buyback programs.”

The NYPD stopped and questioned a record number of people last year, mostly minority-group members who were not charged with any wrongdoing, newly released numbers show.

There were 684,330 stops in 2011, more than six times the 97,296 stops in 2002, the first year of the Bloomberg administration.  Blacks and Hispanics were the targets of 87% of all stops, while whites were involved in only 9%.

“This is not a problem that impacts New Yorkers equally,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Little wonder that to many, policing in New York City is a tale of two cities.”....

In Harlem, where some men sport buttons that read “Stop and Frisk” with a red line through the words, Dominick Sanchez, 20, said he was stopped Monday and questioned about robberies on the block.

“If you’re not white, you’re going to get stopped,” said Sanchez, who is black. “I want to talk back to them, but they threaten you.”

"Jazz Hayden and the Fight Against Stop-and-Frisk: An unlikely activist's battle with the NYPD's frisky business"  by Graham Rayman. Village Voice, February 08, 2012

In 2010, the NYPD, in a campaign touted by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as a key element in the war on crime, stopped more than 600,000 people throughout the city. From 2004 to 2009, police stopped 2.8 million people; the largest age group is males 15 to 19, following by males ages 20 to 24. Just 9 percent of the stops resulted in an arrest. And in 2011, the police were on pace for 686,000 stops—a new record.

In the 2010 [Village] Voice series "The NYPD Tapes," police supervisors in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant order cops to make a quota of one or two stops per tour. Police Officer Adil Polanco, who was assigned to a Bronx precinct, said similarly that there was a stop-and-frisk quota there. If those orders are typical for most precincts—and that appears to be the case from the tapes and Polanco's statements—then quotas are a key factor in fueling the rise in stops...

In the month of January [2012] alone, more than three dozen lawsuits alleging improper stop-and-frisks were filed, based on a Voice reading of the complaints. Extrapolated, that means that the city could be sued more than 400 times this year alone just on improper stops.

The people who filed suit last month appear to come from all walks of life—an auto mechanic, two high school students, a commuter, a Transit Authority worker, a guy walking home with a bag full of dog food. In all of the cases, the criminal charges, if any, were dismissed.

Take Francis Destouche, for example. Destouche, a 53-year-old auto mechanic with a clean record, was walking home in the Bronx in October 2011 when he was stopped for no apparent reason by police. They searched him, found nothing, and then accused him of "throwing something away." He was arrested, held for 20 hours, and missed his granddaughter's birth. The charges were dismissed. Destouche's lawyer, Paul Mills, alleges that the stop and the arrest were a result of the NYPD's "quota policy"....

Or consider the case of "M.S.," a 16-year-old Staten Island youth who says he was stopped for walking down the street, detained, and searched. His backpack was searched. He was physically restrained. Charges were eventually dismissed. The lawsuit goes on to quote at length from stop-and-frisk studies, which suggest a bias against young black and Hispanic males.

Scott Joyner was waiting for a bus in Brooklyn in June 2011 when he saw cops arresting two other people. An officer walked over and grabbed his arm but released him when he realized Joyner was just standing at the bus stop. Joyner walked to a pay phone to file a 311 complaint, and there he was arrested, he alleges, for trying to make a complaint. Charges were dismissed.

In January 2011, Jamie Jarrett was walking down a Brooklyn street when a van of cops rolled up and began searching him. They found no weapons or drugs. The officers refused to explain why they were placing him under arrest. The charge of marijuana sale was dismissed, but not before Jarrett spent 48 hours in custody....

Likewise, Jarrett Savage claims he was illegally stopped and frisked in October 2010 in Brooklyn. He was pushed against a wall, searched, and taken to the precinct, where he was strip-searched in front of another prisoner. The charges were dismissed eventually...

Ramon Morales says he was cleaning his car outside his sister's house on Cabrini Boulevard in Manhattan in August 2009 when cops stopped him for no apparent reason, accused him of drug possession, and searched him and the car. They found no drugs but charged him with a DWI, even though he wasn't driving. Eighteen court appearances and nearly two years later, the charges were dismissed. And Morales claims someone stole stuff from his car while it was in police custody.

Daryl George, a 36-year-old transit worker who had never been arrested, sued this month following a questionable stop in January 2011. George says he was talking with a friend about buying an iPod in the lobby of a Brooklyn building when police came in, ordered everyone against the wall, and searched them. George didn't have any contraband, though someone else in the lobby did. George was arrested anyway, and though the charges were dismissed and the case was sealed, he was suspended by the Transit Authority and lost five months' pay and benefits.

Kevin Adams claimed he was illegally searched and arrested in February 2010 in the lobby of the Brooklyn building where he lives with his mother. Later that day—the arrest took place at 10 a.m.—they released him because the district attorney declined to prosecute, but not before he was roughed up and strip-searched in a police van.

Gregory Pope also sued last month. He claims he was walking on Coney Island in August 2011 when he was jumped by four plainclothes officers. They searched him. He told them they couldn't just search him for no reason. After that, they arrested him and strip-searched him at the precinct. The police also took his car to the precinct, where they searched it and caused a range of damage. Pope was held in the precinct for a day and then, inexplicably, released without charges.

Schedrick Campbell was walking home with a bag of dog food in March 2011 in Brooklyn when three plainclothes officers grabbed him, accused him of swallowing drugs, and tackled him. Despite a strip search in the precinct and a series of forced and invasive medical tests over two days at Interfaith Hospital, no contraband was found. The hospital billed Campbell $9,500 for the concocted arrest.

And in April 2011, while Keenan Baskerville was walking down a Brooklyn street, he was stopped by police, accused of smoking marijuana, which he denied, and arrested. He was strip-searched, but no contraband was found. Baskerville also sued.

Monique Williams sued as well. She says that when she asked why she was stopped, a police sergeant said to her, "Because I can," a statement that doesn't appear in the NYPD's official stop-and-frisk policy....

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 Meanwhile, the endless saga that is Floyd v. City of New York continues to lumber through federal court. Floyd is a class-action lawsuit filed in 2008 by four citizens and the Center for Constitutional Rights that alleges that the NYPD's massive stop-and-frisk campaign routinely violates the civil rights of New Yorkers. (One citizen is the first named plaintiff, David Floyd, of the Bronx.)

In the latest legal maneuvering in nearly four years of litigation, the plaintiffs have asked the judge for "class certification," which would open the door for hundreds of thousands of additional plaintiffs. The city, on the other hand, is trying to block expert testimony from Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University professor who wrote a study of the strategy.... Darius Charney, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, says the city has refused to engage in any substantive settlement talks, despite the fact the issue is "of great public concern," the judge in the case wrote...

As for the NYPD's claim that the campaign acts as a deterrent to crime—the city uses the Orwellian term "pre-emptive policing"—even though it produces relatively few convictions, Charney says there is "no empirical proof" of that. "There's no study that shows that aggressive stop-and-frisk deters crime," he says. "And you have to have reasonable suspicion under the Fourth Amendment. If they did 700,000 stops a year legally, we wouldn't have a complaint. But we contend the vast majority are illegal."

The Floyd case actually suffered a blow earlier this year, when U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that police had enough reasonable suspicion to frisk Floyd himself.... Scheindlin based the decision on the city's claim that officers were acting on an ongoing pattern of burglaries in the area.

The CCR lawyers, however, went back and looked at the crime statistics for the preceding two months and found, instead, that there had been just one burglary in that area during the period. They filed a new motion based on that.In November, Scheindlin granted the motion. She noted the new evidence was "deeply concerning to the court." "Shockingly," Scheindlin wrote, police use the justification of "high-crime area" in stops even in low-crime areas. Fifty-five percent of stops are justified with that notation. The city justified its stop of Floyd with the high-crime notation. "Plaintiffs have now raised severe doubts about the existence of that [burglary] pattern," Scheindlin wrote, adding that "it would be a miscarriage of justice" to deny Floyd's legal claim as a result.

WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.

I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go.

We need change. When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.

Last May, I was outside my apartment building on my way to the store when two police officers jumped out of an unmarked car and told me to stop and put my hands up against the wall. I complied. Without my permission, they removed my cellphone from my hand, and one of the officers reached into my pockets, and removed my wallet and keys. He looked through my wallet, then handcuffed me. The officers wanted to know if I had just come out of a particular building. No, I told them, I lived next door.

One of the officers asked which of the keys they had removed from my pocket opened my apartment door. Then he entered my building and tried to get into my apartment with my key. My 18-year-old sister was inside with two of our younger siblings; later she told me she had no idea why the police were trying to get into our apartment and was terrified. She tried to call me, but because they had confiscated my phone, I couldn’t answer.

Meanwhile, a white officer put me in the back of the police car. I was still handcuffed. The officer asked if I had any marijuana, and I said no. He removed and searched my shoes and patted down my socks. I asked why they were searching me, and he told me someone in my building complained that a person they believed fit my description had been ringing their bell. After the other officer returned from inside my apartment building, they opened the door to the police car, told me to get out, removed the handcuffs and simply drove off. I was deeply shaken.

Letter To the Editor, New York Times, December 29, 2011

 In “Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?” (Sunday Review, Dec. 18), Nicholas K. Peart illustrates how the lives of young black men are violated regularly by the police, usually without any merit.

Our analysis of 2009 stop-and-frisk data for the New York police shows that 94 percent of stops in 2009 did not lead to an arrest. The analysis also showed that there were 132,000 stops of black men 16 to 24. This is particularly striking since according to Census Bureau data that we examined, only 120,000 black men of that age lived in New York City in 2009. So on average, every young black man can be expected to be stopped and frisked by the police each year.

We cannot accept that so many young people experience their lives this way, particularly at such a formative stage. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recent Young Men’s Initiative made little attempt to address stop-and-frisk policy. We must stop treating young black men like criminals and start thinking of them as potential assets to our recovering and growing economy and society. Until we do, our efforts to improve their education and employment prospects will be hollow.

Lazar Treschan,  Director of Youth Policy, Community Service Society of New York

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"Borough President Seeks Limits on Stop-and-Frisk" by By Kate Taylor, New York Times, September 23, 2011
The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, arguing that Police Department practices are creating a “wall of distrust” between officers and minorities, plans to call this weekend for a major re-examination of the department’s stop-and-frisk policy.

Mr. Stringer plans to argue at a symposium that the spiraling use of the practice — stopping and searching people who officers believe may be armed and dangerous — is disproportionately directed at blacks and Latinos, constituting harassment and making those demographic groups less likely to assist the police in investigations. There were about 600,000 stop-and-frisk encounters in New York City last year.

“We cannot wait a minute longer to have an honest examination of stop-and-frisk and the collateral damage it inflicts on our city every day,” Mr. Stringer says....

Mr. Stringer proposes several changes, including establishing “clear behavioral triggers” to justify a stop-and-frisk; currently, he said, the police often cite “furtive movement” as their only justification. Mr. Stringer suggests trying alternate policing techniques, which he said have been used successfully in other cities. He cited a Boston program called Operation Ceasefire, which sought to deter gang violence...

Criticism of the practice has grown recently. Early this month, a black city councilman and a city aide were arrested while walking in a restricted area along the route of the West Indian Labor Day parade in Brooklyn, in what the arrested men have alleged was a case of racial profiling. The episode prompted several city officials, including Mr. Stringer, to argue that the increasing use of the stop-and-frisk practice had contributed to a culture of racial bias in policing.

The practice is also the subject of a legal challenge brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Last month, a federal judge rejected the city’s effort to have the case dismissed.

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 New York Daily News, “Minority Men: We Are Frisk Targets. News Poll Finds 81 Of 100 Have Been Stopped By Cops,” By Leslie Casimir, Austin Fenner And Patrice O'Shaughnessy, March 26, 1999.

For minority males across the city, the stop and frisk has become routine, experienced by every class in every neighborhood. In street interviews this week with 100 black and Hispanic males between the ages of 14 and 35, a startling number of them – 81 – said they had been stopped, patted down and questioned, without being arrested…. The respondents were asked to detail their experiences with police and their attitudes toward cops. Many offered candid accounts of incidents that left them feeling demeaned....  

In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Gordon Ward called the experiences a blistering rite of passage for young minority males. The 25-year-old Medgar Evers College student estimated he has been stopped by cops 50 times. One night, he said, he was stopped three times.... “They touch you and go through everything you have, and you can’t say anything unless you want to end up the way you don’t want to be,” said Edward Charles, 18, a messenger who lives in the Bronx.... When it first happened, I felt like I was raped, but now I’m getting used to it,” said Charles.

Not so for Alimany Yatteh, 18, an immigrant from Sierra Leone who is still traumatized by his first brush with the police. He said he was 16, walking down St. Nicholas Ave., when two cop cars cut him off and officers jumped out and pushed him against a wall. “Four of them aimed their guns at my head and ordered me to freeze,” said Yatteh, who lives in Harlem. Cops searched his pockets and took his identification, he said. “Everyone in the neighborhood was looking at me like I was a drug dealer…."

Of the 100 males interviewed ... only seven said they view the police as protectors of the community, while 53 said cops are a controlling force and 40 see them as both. The number of stop and frisks increased dramatically in 1994.... Police Commissioner Howard Safir tripled street crime unit staffing in 1997... “It’s not racial profiling, it’s dealing with the population of a community in which there is crime,” Safir said....

But legal predicates are little comfort to men and boys who feel as if they live in a police state. Dereck Henry, a stocky 15-year-old from Washington Heights, offered one of the ways he deals with it. “I walk straight down the street with my head held high….  I show them that I am somebody and not what they think I am,” he said.

 
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“As Officers Stop and Frisk, Residents Raise Their Guard,” by Trymaine Lee, New York Times,  February 4, 2007.

 At 14, Rocky Harris knows the routine: You raise your hands high, you keep your mouth shut and you don’t dare move a muscle.... When they don’t find guns or drugs, Rocky said, they let you go.

He said that he had been searched, fruitlessly, at least three times since last summer, and that he had friends who had been searched repeatedly.  They tell you that you’re selling drugs. But I don’t do nothing wrong. I just play ball,” he said, walking through the Red Hook East housing development in Brooklyn yesterday morning, headed to a community center for a game of basketball.

On Friday, the New York Police Department released a report showing that police officers stopped 508,540 people on city streets in 2006, an average of 1,393 a day and quintuple the number from 2002.... [It] was not hard yesterday in Red Hook to find a handful of that number walking around....  More than half of those stopped, and sometimes frisked, by the police were black.

Anthony James, 28, who works for a large sanitation company and, as such, often keeps late hours, said the police frequently stop him as he leaves or comes home. He said that the stops had become such a problem that he has taken to carrying his work identification badge home to prove to the police that he has a job and is not selling drugs. 

"You see where you’re standing. This is the Red Zone,” he said, mapping with his hands a section of the projects from Columbia Street to Clinton Avenue. “This is the war zone. If they catch you in here alone they’re going to stop you.

 
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Police stop a man in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the lobby of his apartment building   / NY Times

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"A Few Blocks, 4 Years, 52,000 Police Stops"  By  Ray Rivera, Al Baker and Janet Roberts, New York Times, July 11, 2010

When Night falls, police officers blanket some eight odd blocks of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Squad cars with flashing lights cruise along the main avenues... On the inner streets, dozens of officers, many fresh out of the police academy, walk in pairs or linger on corners. Others, deeper within the urban grid, navigate a maze of public housing complexes, patrolling the stairwells and hallways. This small army of officers, night after night, spends much of its energy pursuing the controversial Police Department tactic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk,” and it does so at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the city.

The officers ... stop and question people who merely enter the public housing project buildings without a key; they ask for identification from, and run warrant checks on, young people halted for riding bicycles on the sidewalk....

Between January 2006 and March 2010, the police made nearly 52,000 stops on these blocks and in these buildings, according to a New York Times analysis.... These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made based on “fit description.” Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the city’s public housing.

The encounters ... yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made in this neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns....

New York is among several major cities across the country that rely heavily on the stop-and-frisk tactic, but few cities, according to law enforcement experts, employ it with such intensity. In 2002, the police citywide documented 97,000 of these stops; last year, the department registered a record: 580,000....

The United States Supreme Court established the legal basis for stops and frisks — reasonable belief that a person is armed and dangerous — in the 1968 case of Terry v. Ohio. But the officer in that case had a far different level of experience than many of the officers walking the streets of Brownsville. He had patrolled the same streets of downtown Cleveland for 30 years looking for pickpockets and shoplifters. By comparison, the nearly 200 officers who operate in the neighborhood as part of Mr. Kelly’s “Impact Zone” program ... are largely on their first assignment out of the academy.

The data show the initiative is conducted aggressively, sometimes in what can seem like a frenzy. During one month — January 2007 — the police executed an average of 61 stops a day. The high number of stops in this part of Brooklyn can be explained in part by the fact that police can use violations of city Housing Authority rules to justify stops. For instance, the Housing Authority, which oversees public housing developments, forbids people from being in their buildings unless they live there or are visiting someone.

And so on a single Friday in January 2009, the police stopped 109 people in this area, 55 of them inside the project buildings, almost half for suspicion of trespassing. The show of force resulted in two arrests for misdemeanor possession of marijuana and misdemeanor possession of a weapon.

Inside the project buildings and out, males 15 to 34 years of age, who make up about 11 percent of the area’s population, accounted for 68 percent of the stops over the years. That amounted to about five stops a year each, though it was impossible to tell how often someone was stopped or if that person lived in the neighborhood, because the data did not include the names or addresses of those stopped. Police officials say the age figures sound right, since most crime suspects fit that description.

Young black men get stopped so often that a few years ago, Gus Cyrus, coach of the football team at nearby Thomas Jefferson High School, started letting his players leave practice with their bright orange helmets so the police would not confuse them with gang members.  “My players were always calling me saying ‘Coach, the police have me,’ ” Mr. Cyrus said....

Almost everyone in the projects has a story. There is Jonathan Guity, a 26-year-old legal assistant with no criminal record, who, when asked how many times he had been stopped in the neighborhood where he grew up, said, “Honestly, I’d say 30 to 40 times. I’m serious.” ....

Oddly, years ago when crime was higher, relations with the police seemed better, several residents said. The officers seemed to show a greater sense of who was law abiding and who was not, they said. Now, many residents say, the newer crop of officers seem to be more interested in small offenses than engaging with residents. “Rookies,” said Sandra Carter, 60, as she sat on a bench outside 372 Blake Avenue.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
July 28, 2010:  An article on July 12 about the New York Police Department’s tactic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk” and its application in eight blocks of Brownsville, Brooklyn, referred imprecisely to the legal standard that governs when police officers are permitted to frisk someone. The United States Supreme Court has held that in order for the police to frisk someone they must have a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous. The standard cited in the article — reasonable suspicion of a crime — is enough to justify a stop, but not enough to make a legal frisk.

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Police officers stopped a man in Brownsville, Brooklyn after he was seen spitting on the sidewalk and entering an unlocked door. After a check for warrants, he was let go.

From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them. Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing....

Not only are most of the people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is no defense for this policy. It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease. 

Police Department statistics show that 2,798,461 stops were made in that six-year period. In 2,467,150 of those instances, the people stopped had done nothing wrong. That’s 88.2 percent of all stops over six years. Black people were stopped during that period a staggering 1,444,559 times. Hispanics accounted for 843,817 of the stops and whites 287,218.

While crime has been going down, the number of people getting stopped by the police is going up. Last year, more than 575,000 stops were made — a record. But 504,594 of those stops were of people who had done nothing wrong. They had committed no crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal substances.

Still, day after day, the cops continue harassing and degrading these innocent New Yorkers, often making them line up against walls, or lean spread-eagled on the hoods of cars, or sprawl face down in the street to be searched like criminals in front of curious, sometimes frightened, sometimes giggling, sometimes outraged onlookers.

If the police officers were treating white middle-class or wealthy individuals this way, the movers and shakers in this town would be apoplectic. The mayor would be called to account in an atmosphere of thunderous outrage, and the police commissioner would be gone. But the people getting stopped and frisked are mostly young, and most of them are black or brown and poor. So Police Commissioner Ray Kelly could feel completely comfortable with his department issuing the order in 2006 that reports of all stops and frisks be forwarded and compiled “for input into the Department’s database”....

So the department is collecting random information on innocent, primarily poor, black and brown New Yorkers for use in some anticipated future criminal investigation. But it is not collecting and storing massive amounts of information on innocent middle-class or wealthy white people. Why is that, exactly?

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"Study Finds Street Stops by N.Y. Police Unjustified," By Al Baker And Ray Rivera, New York Times, October 26, 2010

 Tens of thousands of times over six years, the police stopped and questioned people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing so, a new study says. And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.

The study was conducted on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s stop-question-and-frisk policy.... The study examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009 that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk them...

Professor Fagan found that in more than 30 percent of stops, officers either lacked the kind of suspicion necessary to make a stop constitutional or did not include sufficient detail on police forms to determine if the stops were legally justified. The study also found that even accounting for crime patterns in the city’s various neighborhoods, officers stopped minorities at disproportionate rates. 

Nearly 150,000 of the stops — 6.7 percent of all cases in which an officer made a stop based on his own discretion, rather than while responding to a radio call in which some information had already been gathered — lacked legal sufficiency, the study concluded. Stops were considered unjustified if officers provided no primary reason articulating a reasonable suspicion for the stop.

For example, if an officer conducted a stop solely because a person was in a high-crime area — without listing a primary reason, like the person “fits a description” of a crime suspect or appeared to be “casing” a store — the stop was considered unjustified.  If an officer cited only “other” as the reason for the stop, with no other details, it was deemed unjustified in the study.  An additional 544,000 cases, or 24 percent of all discretionary stops, did not have enough information on the forms that officers are required to fill out after such encounters.

The United States Supreme Court has held that in order for police officers to stop someone, they must be able to articulate a reasonable suspicion of a crime. To frisk them, they must have a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous. Darius Charney, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the study ... "confirms what we have been saying for the last 10 or 11 years, which is that ... it is really race, not crime, that is driving this,” Mr. Charney said....

Force was 14 percent more likely to be used in stops of blacks and 9.3 percent more likely for Hispanics, compared with white suspects. Guns were not often found (they were discovered in 0.15 percent of all stops). And weapons and other contraband were seized nearly 15 percent less often in stops of blacks than of whites, and nearly 23 percent less often in stops of Hispanics. If stops that resulted in some form of sanction, blacks were 31 percent more likely than whites to be arrested than issued summonses.
 

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"Police Report Far More Stops And Searches" By Al Baker And Emily Vasquez,  New York Times, February 3, 2007

The New York Police Department released new information yesterday showing that police officers stopped 508,540 individuals on New York City streets last year [2006] — an average of 1,393 stops per day....  The number was up from 97,296 in 2002, the last time the department divulged 12 months' worth of data.... 

[The police] department delivered four bound volumes of statistics to the Council in midafternoon. The raw data showed that more than half of those stopped last year were black...  At the same time, the average number of people arrested per quarter as a result of such stops almost doubled....

Until yesterday, the most recent information released by the Police Department about how and why it stops people to search them, sometimes looking for illegal guns, was from 2003... Some officials have said that lag put the department at odds with a pair of legal requirements that sprang from public outrage at the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler....  [Many] contended that there was a pattern of racial profiling in stop-and-frisks. A state study later in 1999 confirmed racial disparities in such stops.

The guidelines to monitor stop-and-frisks in detail were set forth in a city law signed in 2001, and in a federal court case settled by the Bloomberg administration in 2004. Both called for the Police Department to release to the City Council, four times a year, basic data about the people who are stopped and questioned by officers, and the reasons for such encounters. But until yesterday, it had been a year since the department reported its stop-and-frisk activity, and those numbers dated from a three-month period ending in September 2003.

In the meantime, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city agency that investigates charges of police misconduct, found that complaints involving stops and searches have more than doubled in recent years...  Complaints involving police stops now account for 33 percent of all complaints, up from 20 percent in 2003....

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that ... aggressive street enforcement was partly responsible for the increase in stop-and-frisks. Also, he said, ''careful accounting'' of such encounters by the department in recent years made the increase seem greater....

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New York Times Editorial, "Civil Rights and Resisting Arrest," October 18, 2011

 The arrest of a New York City police officer, who was accused of violating the civil rights of an African-American man during a stop-and-frisk arrest, provides good reason for Justice Department officials and state lawmakers to investigate whether others on the force are engaging in similar practices. Federal prosecutors on Monday charged the officer, Michael Daragjati, with violating the man’s constitutional rights by falsely accusing him of resisting arrest. The criminal complaint suggests how easily that charge can be abused. Nearly 6,000 New Yorkers were taken into custody last year with resisting arrest as the most serious charge against them, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has reported.

The African-American man was walking in a residential area of Staten Island when he was stopped, shoved against the side of a parked van and searched by Officer Daragjati, who is white. The officer found no drugs or weapons, but grew angry when the man complained about his treatment and asked for the officer’s name and badge number. Prosecutors say that Officer Daragjati arrested the man, who put up no struggle, and falsified a police report, charging the man with resisting arrest, a misdemeanor.

The officer’s conduct might easily have escaped notice had he not been under surveillance for alleged extortion and insurance fraud, with which he has also been charged. Civil rights lawyers have long complained about trumped-up arrests of mainly minority citizens who are dragged into the criminal justice system.

Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently directed the police not to arrest people with small amounts of marijuana unless the drug is in open view. Low-level marijuana offenses have contributed to the arrests of hundreds of thousands of people since the mid-1990s. We need to know whether bogus charges of resisting arrest are widespread.

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Letter to the Editor, New York Times, Oct 23, 2011

 Re “Civil Rights and Resisting Arrest” (editorial, Oct. 19):

 We support the call by your editorial board and several public officials for a federal investigation into the stop-and-frisk policies of the New York Police Department. The recent allegation that a Staten Island police officer fabricated charges against a person of color after he protested being stopped for no reason, together with the disturbing statistics that the vast majority of those stopped by the N.Y.P.D. are black or Hispanic, continues to raise troubling questions about the fairness of these policies.

Too many young men of color are being needlessly brought into the criminal justice system, only to come out with a criminal record, thereby limiting their future prospects. It is time for an in-depth investigation of this situation, which can be done only by the federal government.

KEVIN D. O’CONNELL

President, New York State Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers

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New York Times / November 18, 2007

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Although the following is a national story, and not explicitly about stop and frisks, it is represenative of what has been happening in New York City and in every big city in America.

"Nearly 1 in 3 will be arrested by age 23"  By Donna Leinwand Leger, USA TODAY, Dec 19, 2011

 Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study published Monday in Pediatrics found. "Arrest is a pretty common experience," says Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and principal author of the study.... The latest study finds 30.2% of young people will be arrested by age 23....

The new study is an analysis of data collected between 1997 and 2008 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The annual surveys conducted over 11 years asked children, teens and young adults between the ages of 8 and 23 whether they had ever been arrested by police or taken into custody for illegal or delinquent offenses.

The question excluded only minor traffic offenses, so youth could have included arrests for a wide variety of offenses such as truancy, vandalism, underage drinking, shoplifting, robbery, assault and murder — any encounter with police perceived as an arrest, Brame says...

The high rate of arrest among youth is troubling because the records will follow them as adults and make it harder for them to get student loans, jobs and housing, says Kurlychek, an associate professor at University at Albany-SUNY who studies juvenile delinquency. "Arrests have worse consequences than ever for these juveniles," she says. Arrest records "follow you forever. The average teenager who steals an iPod or is arrested for possession of marijuana — why do we make that define their lives?"

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Video

"Stop and Frisk in Brownsville, Brooklyn: Residents Question a Police Tactic

Seven-minute video from NY Times by Mathew Orr, Ray Rivera, Al Baker

Stigma: Yale Law School Stop and Frisk synopsis

“Stigma” explores the dynamic between the community and the police through the eyes of three people who grew up on the streets of New York City.