“It is not about crime, it is about control and policing in communities,” said Andrea Ritchie, a member of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a group that works to end violence in minority neighborhoods.
Asked for further comment, RAND spokesman Robak would only offer only this confirmation in an e-mail: “We have received the subpoena and it is being reviewed by our attorneys." The NYPD did not return requests for comment.
The Floyd case, filed on behalf of David Floyd, Lalit Clarkson, and Deion Dennis, black men who say police unfairly stopped them, stems from another “stop and frisk” lawsuit filed by CCR in 1999, Daniels, et al. v. City of New York. The case was settled in 2003 with an agreement that while the NYPD would admit no wrongdoing, it would hand over the “stop and frisk reports” to the Center for Constitutional Rights, monitor incidents of racial profiling, conduct workshops educating students about their rights, and hold joint public meetings with the plaintiffs. Police stopped handing over the statistics after the third quarter of 2003, however, and there was gross non-compliance with court directives, CCR attorneys said. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said at a public conference in Jan. 2007 that reports were delayed because the NYPD was still compiling the data. (For details, see City Limits Weekly #573, Feb. 5, 2007, Stopped and Frisked In '06: NYPD Finally Provides Stats.)
Instead, the police’s stop and frisk data since 1998 was given to the RAND Corporation to analyze. Its analysis of the data concluded that the police were generally not showing racial profiling patterns during stop and frisks. Civil advocates say RAND is “whitewashing” the data, however, and counter with the fact that in the first three months of this year 145,098 people were stopped compared to 109,855 people stopped in the last quarter of last year. More than half the people stopped were black. In 2007, the NYPD stopped about 469,000 New Yorkers – almost 1,300 people every day. More than half of the people stopped were black, although they make up only a quarter of the city’s population. Another 30 percent were of Hispanic descent (much closer to the American Community Survey's count showing almost 28 percent of the population as Hispanic or Latino).
This is why, advocates say, they want the NYPD to comply with racial profiling guidelines. Other police agencies around the nation, such as Maryland State Police and the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, have worked under consent decree with federal agencies to change racial profiling practices. This has not been the case with the NYPD.
However, the NYCLU remains confident that if it wins the current cases to change NYPD stop and frisk practices, they will make sure it can get done: “We are confident that we will be able to enforce changes, and the federal courts are in a position to enforce an order. That’s not to say it doesn’t take a lot of work. It takes a lot of diligence by everyone to make sure it happens,” said Dunn.
Cara Tabachnick is a freelance journalist and associate director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
This article has been corrected to reflect that RAND says its analysis is of 500,00 incidents (not 1 million), and that its analysis generally did not show racial profiling (but did not "justify" NYPD methods). 5/29/08
