The New York Police Department’s anti-crime units are still stopping, frisking and searching too many people unlawfully — almost all of them people of color — despite assurances from Mayor Eric Adams that new policies and training would end the practice, according to a new report by a court-appointed monitor.
The monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein, filed a report in federal court in Manhattan on Monday detailing what she described as unlawful policing. Ms. Denerstein, whose position was created in 2013 after a court ruled the Police Department’s use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional, is assigned to oversee the units, which have a history of targeting Black and Hispanic people.
Earlier versions of the units were responsible for a disproportionate number of police shootings, and they were disbanded in 2020. Mr. Adams reinstated and renamed them after he took office last year, but critics were skeptical that they could be run without racially profiling young men of color, as previous units had.
Almost all of the stops made by the rebranded “neighborhood safety teams” analyzed in the report — 97 percent — were of Black or Hispanic people, and 24 percent of the stops were unconstitutional. Of 230 car stops included in the sample, only two appear to have turned up weapons, the report said.
The study found especially troubling numbers in a handful of precincts, including the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, where only 41 percent of the stops, 32 percent of frisks and 26 percent of searches were constitutional, according to the report.
Police and city officials took issue with the report’s conclusions and said the units had been effective both in keeping interactions with the public lawful and in reducing killings. Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, said the mayor’s office had serious concerns about the report’s methodology.
“Following the creation of the neighborhood safety teams in March 2022, shootings have consistently fallen and were down by double digits last year, and that trend has continued into 2023,” he said.
There were 433 homicides last year, a roughly 11 percent drop from 2021 and the fewest since 2019. Also last year, the city saw a surge in gun arrests, with 4,627 — the most in nearly three decades.
Many New Yorkers opposed reviving the anti-crime units, whose officers often patrol in unmarked cars looking for people who they believe are behaving suspiciously, rather than responding in a routine manner to 911 calls.
Monday’s report said its findings, which analyzed the first seven full months of the revived units’ patrol, April though October 2022, warranted a more comprehensive audit. It called on the department to submit a plan within a month on how to improve its practices to conduct stops properly without violating constitutional rights.
Ms. Denerstein, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, produced the report with a team that included four former members of the Police Department. They analyzed stop reports filled out by officers, footage from body cameras, information about the corresponding 911 call and other information available to the police.
During some unlawful stops, she said, “You have former officers looking at video and stating that the stops are not being done correctly.”
The units rolled out under Mr. Adams appeared to have a higher rate of unlawful stops than in an extensive sample of stops by all officers citywide in 2020, the monitor’s last review, the report said.
Mr. Levy, the mayor’s spokesman, said that the units have had enhanced training, and that they protect both New Yorkers’ physical safety and their rights. “Any unconstitutional stop is unacceptable and we will strive to do better for New Yorkers every day,” he said.
In a prepared statement, police officials said the department had several layers of oversight. They said the monitor had drawn incorrect conclusions about some encounters and said that the units “engage with the public lawfully and constitutionally.”
The earlier anti-crime units had grown out of the department’s Street Crime Unit, which developed a swaggering reputation in the 1980s with its bold “We Own the Night” motto and penchant for hunting down armed criminals.
The Street Crime Unit sparked a public outcry after its members killed Amadou Diallo, who was Black and unarmed, in 1999, shooting at him 41 times. The group was disbanded in 2002.
It was replaced by the anti-crime units, which police officials have called one of their most effective tools in the battle against illegal guns. They have said the squads make Black and Hispanic neighborhoods safer by removing thousands of weapons from the streets.
Critics have disputed their effectiveness and derided them for playing an outsize role in the searches of millions of young men during the height of the stop-and-frisk era. A decade ago, a federal judge ruled that the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics were a form of racial profiling that violated constitutional rights.
Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, had disbanded the units in 2020, with crime at historic lows, and amid the social justice protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
By the following year, gun violence was rising, and Mr. Adams, then a mayoral candidate, promised more aggressive policing. Critics called it a departure from his days as a captain in the Police Department, when he became a prominent voice against stop-and-frisk tactics.
As mayor, he said that he and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell would recruit at least 400 officers who would be vetted, trained and closely supervised to avoid discriminatory arrests and brutal tactics.
Officers would continue to patrol in unmarked vehicles, Mr. Adams said, but no longer in plainclothes, which made it hard to identify them and often caused problems. They would wear a modified uniform bearing a police insignia, in order to increase accountability.
Molly Griffard, a staff lawyer with the Legal Aid Society, said Monday’s report suggested that the units still use “hyperaggressive policing tactics” and confirmed fears that they were “like their Anti-Crime and Street Crime Unit predecessors, rife with misconduct and prone to abuse the rights of the very people they are tasked with protecting.”
Jonathan Moore, a lawyer who faced off against the city in the 2013 lawsuit, said Mr. Adams “changed his stripes when he became mayor,” from testifying against the use of stop and frisk in the lawsuit, to reviving it “as a program that still has cops jumping out of unmarked cars at young Black and Hispanic men, to try and instill fear in them.”
Ms. Denerstein’s report described a lack of oversight by department officials, cited supervisors for failing to address improper stops, frisks and searches, and ordered the department to “take corrective action immediately.”
The report did praise some commands for conducting stops impeccably and called them models for lower-performing precincts in combining lawful and effective policing.
Ms. Denerstein said the compliant precincts showed that “lawful policing is effective.”
“In some commands, you have a high level of compliance, which makes it clear that lawful and effective policing are compatible,” Ms. Denerstein said. She said the report provided police officials a chance to improve matters.
“This is an opportunity for them to course-correct,” she said. “They can do better. Every New Yorker expects it and I hope they take this as an opportunity to do better.”
The post N.Y.P.D. Anti-Crime Units Still Stopping People Illegally, Report Shows appeared first on New York Times.
