Two years after Mayor Eric Adams of New York ordered the Police Department to revive specialized units focused on getting firearms off the streets, the squads are stopping, frisking and searching too many people in violation of the law, according to a court-appointed monitor.
The monitor, Mylan Denerstein, filed a report in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday that found that the units, the Neighborhood Safety Teams and Public Safety Teams, were responsible for about 54 percent of the unlawful stops reported by the Police Department in the first half of 2023.
The department as a whole is still conducting too many stops, frisks and searches that violate the law, the monitor found, and the numbers are increasing. The monitor has highlighted the trend at least twice before, but it persists.
This week’s 54-page report comes over a decade after the department’s use of stop and frisk was deemed unconstitutional by a federal court and an independent monitor was appointed to oversee changes. But the department is still struggling to carry out court-mandated reforms, according to Ms. Denerstein. And since Mr. Adams, a former police captain, took office in 2022, critics have denounced what they call a return to aggressive policing tactics aimed at Black and Latino men.
“Full compliance with the reforms ordered by the court should be the utmost priority,” said Charles McLaurin, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Yet officers fail to report their encounters with New Yorkers and continue to abuse their authority by taking law enforcement actions beyond the bounds of the law.”
In a statement, the Police Department said it was proud “of the reforms that it has made, which the monitor has recognized,” and was “committed to working collaboratively with the monitor to address the areas of concern raised in this latest report.”
City Hall did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Adams has called street stops an important part of an effective public safety strategy.
In 2013, a court ruled that the Police Department’s use of warrantless stop-and-frisk tactics was unconstitutional. At the program’s peak, in the first quarter of 2012, the police stopped New Yorkers — mostly Black and Latino men — more than 200,000 times. Most had done nothing wrong.
More than a decade later, Ms. Denerstein, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, produced the report with a team that analyzed officers’ reports, body-camera footage, data from corresponding 911 calls and other information.
But the data, gathered at various times from 2020 to 2023, is not complete, the monitor said.
In 2022, a review of body-camera footage found that police officers did not report about 31 percent of incidents in which they stopped and searched someone without making an arrest. That’s an increase from about 11 percent of such stops that went unreported two years before.
The monitor said that the Police Department had instituted new training programs and made “significant changes” to policies, like requiring body cameras and auditing procedures. However, she added, “compliance entails more,” and “the department must focus on proper supervision of officers so that stop-and-frisk practices are in accordance with the law.”
Mr. Adams, a Democrat, ran as a tough-on-crime candidate, but he also vowed to enact police reforms, and critics say he has not lived up to that promise.
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Adams brought back the specialized police unit, which had been disbanded under his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Mr. de Blasio removed the units after George Floyd’s killing in 2020 over concerns that their plainclothes officers were involved in a disproportionate number of civilian complaints and fatal shootings.
Mr. Adams has argued that he was a prominent critic of stop-and-frisk policing under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, when police made millions of stops, and that he had helped curb those abuses. Mr. Adams said at a recent news conference that the practice was a tool that “must be used correctly.”
“You do not say, ‘Take away the tool because it’s not popular’ if the tool is successful,” he said, noting that nearly 17,000 guns had been removed from the streets since he took office in January 2022.
“Those officers who abuse that tool, they must be held accountable,” he added.
As Mr. Adams runs for re-election ahead of a competitive Democratic primary next June, his campaign is focused on a message that he has made the city safer. But some voters believe that his policing strategy has been too aggressive, and his primary opponents have seized on the issue.
Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, said he was frustrated that the Adams administration had overseen a sharp rise in unconstitutional tactics.
“I and many others fought too hard, for too long, on behalf of the communities of color facing the abuse of stop, question and frisk to see us go backward now,” he said. “We must hold this administration to account and our law enforcement to higher standards — we can have better policing and safer streets at the same time.”
Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor, said the report showed the Adams administration’s “willful disregard for police accountability.”
“Mayor Adams has promised endlessly that he would make our city safer while also upholding the civil rights of Black and Latino New Yorkers,” he said. “This new monitor’s report shows he is doing neither.”
Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who is also running for mayor, said in a statement, “Eric Adams must end stop and frisk once and for all.”
Overall, the monitor’s report found that unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches have been increasing in recent years — with unlawful frisks rising to 23 percent in 2022 from about 16 percent in 2021, and unlawful searches rising to nearly 30 percent from 20 percent during the same period.
In one example, the monitoring team’s review found that young Black and Latino men, often those wearing fanny packs, have been stopped by officers without reasonable suspicion. In many cases, the officers were in cars far enough away that it was unlikely “for the officer to observe what might be a weapon through the fabric in a fanny pack.”
Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union who has been an informal adviser to Mr. Adams, called the report “serious and substantial.”
“The N.Y.P.D. must immediately address this critical longstanding problem,” Mr. Siegel said. “We thought we had addressed this issue years ago but if it’s rearing its ugly head, it needs to be addressed immediately.”
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