David R. Jones (137830)
David R. Jones Credit: Contributed

The whining and complaining began as soon as the New York City Council floated the idea of enacting new rules to check racial bias by the New York City Police Department which would entail logging the demographic information of everyone stopped by police.

As the Council approved the measure, the naysayers squealed that tracking low-level investigative encounters would undermine public safety, create a paperwork headache and overburden one of the largest and most influential police departments on earth.

If all the grumbling and grinding of teeth is a sign, then the How Many Stops Act must have hit the bullseye. The Council took this step to put a check on police stops and the unconstitutional practice of stop-and-frisk. This is a long time coming. I’ve said this before, and it bears repeating: No one is saying the NYPD should stop enforcing the laws. Just stop policing practices that single out Black and Latinx young men.  

In passing the act and a separate ban on solitary confinement in city jails – both by veto-proof majorities – the Council is literally putting its foot down, drawing a line in the sand.  Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, is critical of the bills and has declined to say if he will sign them.   

I strongly support the How Many Stops Act, because it encourages the transparency of police actions by creating an empirical window into the benefits or drawbacks of policing policy.  And at a time when police misconduct complaints have increased, consider stepped-up tracking of police encounters as correcting a glaring omission in CompStat, the crime database that drives NYPD’s policing strategies. 

NYPD officers are already required by law to document Level 3 encounters, also known as stop-and-frisk or “reasonable suspicion” stops. The Council voted that police must also report Level 1 encounters, in which officers can approach someone not necessarily under suspicion of criminal activity, and Level 2 encounters, in which officers can approach civilians based on a founded suspicion of criminal activity.

We expect it will document what we already know to be true: Police presence is qualitatively and quantitatively different in predominantly white areas versus communities of color in New York City. No record of low-level encounters can be assumed to mask an even bigger problem about current stop-and-frisk policing practices in New York City.  

For years, the NYPD has declined to do away with stop-and-frisk, or at least to dramatically curb the practice, which has been found to target Black and Latinx people.  It was a source of controversy during the terms of mayors Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and, now, Adams.  Enforcement should be based on criminal activity and public safety, not poverty and race and ethnicity. Yet, stop and frisk tactics that target more economically disadvantaged communities of color harm any aspirations the city has of becoming a more economically and racially just place to live and work. 

The practice has continued despite decades of public outcry about violations of constitutional rights.  For example, the abuse of police power was so bad in 2010 that in Brownsville, Brooklyn, police that year made 93 stops for every 100 residents in the neighborhood, according to a study by Natalie Rosenblatt, a researcher at Wayne State University Law School. In 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled the NYPD’s practices violated New Yorkers’ right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.  

Let’s not forget that Bloomberg publicly apologized after a 2015 tape surfaced in which he advocated throwing minority kids “up against the walls and frisk them.” He also acknowledged that he continued to aggressively advocate the practice long after Judge Scheindlin ruled the tactic was a “form of racial profiling.” 

In first three quarters of 2023, NYPD stopped more than 12,000 pedestrians, on pace to surpass the near-record number of 15,102 stop-and-frisk encounters in 2022, according to the most recent data. Those figures compare to 8,947 in 2021.  Last year’s numbers include a police surge in the subways to crackdown on fair beaters.  It resulted in 1,900 more fare evasion arrests and 34,000 more summonses through September 2023, up roughly 250 percent and 160 percent respectively from 2022, according to Gothamist

Yet, the outcome has not been worth the cost. Transit police reported a mere two percent drop in “major crimes,” and the amount of police overtime pay, $155 million, dwarfs the potential $3.4 million in revenue from the additional $100 fair evasion summonses, if in fact they are paid. 

As a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) board, I can say with certainty not as much attention is paid to mostly white fare beaters on MTA buses in Staten Island.  For that reason, the subway crackdown appears driven in part by race as well as income inequity instead of sheer lawlessness.  

The How Many Stops Act is about the only initiative in recent memory specifically intended to curb excessive policing tactics aimed at predominantly Blacks and Latinos.  It deserves our support.

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 and a member of the MTA Board. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer.  The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.

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