New Yorkers have seen this movie before. The NYPD’s newest anti-gun push borrows heavily from an old script—one that turns routine encounters into dragnet stops, concentrates enforcement in Black and brown neighborhoods, and too often treats constitutional limits as optional.
A recent lawsuit by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the NAACP New York State Conference, and The Bronx Defenders lays out the case starkly: NYPD vehicle searches have surged, overwhelmingly target drivers of color, and rarely turn up guns. The complaint calls it what millions of New Yorkers will recognize from lived experience –“stop-and-frisk on wheels.”
The numbers are eye-opening. NYPD conducted 28,416 vehicle searches in 2024, an 83 percent increase from 2023; more than 84 percent of all searches from 2022 through September 2025 were of Black or Latino drivers, while white motorists accounted for less than four percent. Search rates are higher across all 78 precincts for Black and Latino drivers. Critically, these searches “almost never” recover a weapon according to the lawsuit.
Those car stops sit atop a broader resurgence of pedestrian stops. The court-appointed monitor in Floyd v. City of New York has repeatedly found persistent racial disparities and a troubling share of stops and frisks that lack constitutional footing. In April 2024, the monitor documented disparities across commands and post-stop outcomes; later reports highlighted under-reporting of stops and elevated rates of unlawful frisks and searches—particularly by specialized gun-suppression units.
If this all sounds familiar, it is. The monitor’s special reviews of Neighborhood Safety Teams (NSTs)—units championed to take guns off the street—found about a quarter of their stops unlawful and 97 percent of the people they stopped to be Black or Latino. In a sample of 230 car stops, NSTs recovered a weapon twice. Those findings are not outliers; subsequent monitor snapshots and civil-rights groups’ summaries have underscored rising unconstitutional stops and chronic under-reporting citywide.
And what’s the NYPD’s justification for a policy that routinely violates the constitutional rights of Black and Latino motorists? They claim they go where the crime is. But a volume defense is not a constitutional defense. The Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments do not relax in zip codes with higher 911 call volumes. And there’s something else. This is not about random vehicle stops, according to Donna Lieberman, longtime executive director of the NYCLU. Rather, it’s about what happens to people after they are stopped.
“Police officers are not supposed to search the cars people are in unless they have suspicion that they are doing some harm, violence or using a weapon,” Lieberman said. “And when you don’t turn up a weapon in virtually any of the cases, it ceases to be a tool to get guns off the street. So, it’s not about crime, getting guns off the street or reducing violence. It’s about racial profiling.”
Former Mayor Eric Adams tolerated this revival of aggressive tactics as the necessary price of driving down shootings. But independent watchdogs have not found strong evidence that the spike in stops is what’s moving safety metrics; they have found substantial evidence of illegality and disparity. For example, ProPublica’s coverage of the federal monitor’s 2025 report on the NYPD’s Community Response Team labeled the conduct “troubling” and “unconstitutional.” The NYCLU has likewise shown that as pedestrian stops fell dramatically after Floyd, violent crime didn’t spike, undercutting the core claim that mass stopping is essential to safety.
Meanwhile, police accountability is a myth. In September 2024, a court-ordered 500-page disciplinary review concluded officers who engage in unconstitutional stops and frisks “rarely, if ever” face discipline—even when the Civilian Complaint Review Board substantiates misconduct.
Data-driven gun violence prevention doesn’t look like this. If your anti-gun strategy requires blanket traffic enforcement in minority neighborhoods, produces massive racial disparities and almost no firearm recoveries from those vehicle searches, it’s not a strategy—it’s a tax on dignity and equal protection. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is the architect of the use of data collection in police practices and policies at the NYPD. We can only hope that the Commissioner is as concerned by the allegations in this lawsuit as we are and makes changes.
A press release on the commissioner’s ‘State of the Department’ address last week announced that police officers will undergo updated “in-service training” covering a range of topics including constitutional policing. That’s good. Maybe we should take a look at the training to make sure officers have the same understanding of what is constitutional as we do.
Finally, Mayor Mamdani must hold the NYPD accountable. He knows that when bad actors in the NYPD get away with abusive behavior and misconduct, it is not good for lion share of police officers who act with integrity, professionalism and a genuine commitment to public safety. More importantly, it hurts the community’s faith in policing.
Gun violence is real and it demands effective action. But turning Black and brown motorists into suspects first and citizens second is neither effective nor lawful. The question now is not whether the mayor can rein in racial profiling and make accountability real; it’s whether he will.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.