A new report from a federal court-ordered monitor slams “troubling” and “unconstitutional” stop-and-frisks by an elite New York City Police Department unit founded and championed by Mayor Eric Adams.
The Adams administration’s Community Response Team (CRT), established to focus on quality-of-life issues like motorbikes and car alarms, has devolved into “stopping, frisking, and searching unconstitutionally” mostly innocent Black and Hispanic people, the monitor said.
The CRT is a disgrace. The federal monitor found that “97% of the individuals stopped, frisked, and searched were Black or Hispanic men.” In a sample of body camera footage, the monitor said, 41 percent of stops, searches, and frisks by CRT officers were unlawful. That compares to a 2022 audit of NYPD safety-team stops that concluded a quarter of their stops were unlawful.
Since Adams took office, the recorded number of legally dubious police pat downs have nearly tripled. This is the direct result of his administration’s support for gung-ho policing tactics that Adams condemned as an activist police captain before he sought elected office.
The Adams administration cites CRT in touting a drop in murders and shootings, but sharp increases in overall crime citywide expose the CRT gambit as a failure. This is especially so because of the terrible social costs – documented by the federal monitor – of CRT terrorizing people of color without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing.
The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk culture continues in the face of yearslong calls for an end to the unlawful practice. In 2013, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled the NYPD’s tactics violated New Yorkers’ constitutional right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. The judge called it a “form of racial profiling.”
The most recent federal monitor’s report is the 25th in a decade. It shows the New York City Council was spot-on to override the Adams’ veto last year to enact the “How Many Stops Act.” The law requires the NYPD to publicly disclose previously undocumented 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.
In the first year of the act’s expanded reporting, the NYPD’s data showed a sharp increase in the number of stop-and-frisks. Police reported 25,386 stops last year, nearly a 50 percent increase over 2023 and the highest number since 2014. That compares to 8,947 in 2021, the year before Adams took office, according to NYPD data.
And even those shocking totals are undoubtedly an undercount. The federal monitor’s report found that officers frequently failed to report pat downs, even though they were required to do so. In 2024, the report estimated, officers failed to report four in 10 stops. And even when they did, there was a “lack of meaningful review” by supervisors.
Why does the NYPD continue to rationalize racist, long-standing, well-documented human rights violations? Why can’t we just get beyond stop-and-frisk as a policing strategy?
It’s because of a lack of imagination by City Hall and the NYPD brass. Overly aggressive specialized police units are unleashed again and again through the years to wield an indiscriminate unconstitutional hammer. Police double-down on targeting people of color in the misguided belief that abusive tactics are the best way, or maybe the only way, to deter crime.
This bellicose thinking figures in why the NYPD has declined for years to do away with, or even dramatically curb, the practice. It was a public controversy during the terms of mayors Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and now, Adams. Of course, Bloomberg, who publicly apologized for the tactics, earned distinction for a record 685,724 stops in 2011.
In his two-decade police career, Adams spoke out against police brutality, and, later, NYPD stop-and-frisks. He described his administration’s approach as “precision policing” combined with community initiatives and increased police presence in the subways. Over time, Adams has presided over a resurgence in aggressive tactics.
The NYPD’s unions and their political supporters have never offered any alternatives to the stop-and-frisk problem. They simply complain about reforms just to win sympathy and influence public perceptions of their abuses.
In a glimmer of hope, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently pledged to the City Council she would implement stricter measures against officers who ignore stop-and-frisk reporting requirements. The federal monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein, set a deadline of 90 percent reporting compliance by the end of the year. Otherwise, she threatened to take “further action.”
I’ve said this before, and it needs to be repeated: No one is saying the NYPD should stop enforcing the laws. Just stop singling out Black and Hispanic young men.
Clearly, the federal monitor is not holding her breath. “We are tired of monitoring the NYPD,” Denerstein wrote. “It has been eleven years.”
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.