The report, which City Council received on Feb. 2, reveals that more than 500,000 New Yorkers were stopped by the NYPD on city streets last year alone. The last stop-and-frisk figures City Council received date back to 2003 despite the requirements of the Police Reporting Law of 2001, which says the NYPD must supply the council with data from its UF-250 forms – also known as the “Stop, Question and Frisk worksheets” – on a quarterly basis. The forms include the age, gender and race of individuals who are stopped, questioned and frisked. At a public hearing Jan. 24, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly attributed the four-year delay to the technical overhaul of the NYPD database system.
The NYPD, which did not respond to requests from City Limits for comment, has yet to release figures that cover the final three months of 2003 and for the entire years of 2004 and 2005. “Clearly, four years is a long time to wait for this information,” Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens), chairman of council’s public safety committee, told City Limits just hours before the new report was released. “We have a responsibility to conduct oversight, so the delay has definitely been frustrating from that standpoint.”
At least one other group had been eagerly awaiting the numbers, too. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) also is supposed to receive stop-and-frisk data regularly as part of a lawsuit settlement against the NYPD. In 1999, CCR filed a class-action lawsuit titled Daniels, et al. v. City of New York against the department on behalf of 10 young black and Hispanic men who charged that they were stopped and frisked without reasonable suspicion and solely on the basis of their race. Separately that year, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer also sharply criticized the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices for racial profiling. Since then, the NYPD issued a 2002 order outlawing racial profiling. And in a 2003 settlement, the 10 defendants received a total of $167,500 in damages as the NYPD agreed to provide CCR with stop-and-frisk data on a quarterly basis.
The new data, which show that more than half of those stopped by the NYPD last year are black, has caused renewed concern over racial profiling -- a charge NYPD officials steadfastly deny. “They’ve been sending the numbers in to us sporadically. We thought the settlement was a good thing, especially because police departments in most cities don’t have formally written anti-racial profiling policies on the books,” said Bill Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “But my sense is that this just isn’t working out here.”
Another lawyer at CCR, Kamau Karl Franklin, added, “We aren't surprised by those numbers whatsoever. It validates a lot of the things we've been saying. And it supports us moving forward on a lawsuit that we presently have over illegal stop-and-frisks."
According to figures from the Civilian Compliant Review Board, the number of reported stop, question, frisk and search incidents has been rising steadily in recent years. From 2001 to 2005, the total number of complaints the board received about frisk-or-searches more than doubled to 1,651, while the number of stop-and-question complaints rose more than five times, to 2,244. And the review board also has begun to track the number of racial profiling allegations it receives, which rose from 112 during the last six months of 2004 to 177 in 2005.
