A new report by the NYPD federal monitor has placed NYPD’s specialized units under renewed scrutiny. The report, filed in federal court last week, found that these units continued making unconstitutional stops, frisks, and searches at elevated rates compared to the rest of the department in 2025.
In spite of a high level of training, the units failed to meet all but one of the constitutional compliance benchmarks set by the monitor. 91% of those stopped were Black or Hispanic, and 88% were Black or Hispanic men.
The report focused on the NYPD’s Neighborhood Safety Teams (NST), Community Response Teams (CST), and Public Safety Teams (PST). These units engage in proactive policing in high-crime areas, making largely self-initiated stops of people suspected to be engaging in criminal activity.
The units date back to 2022, when they were introduced by former mayor Eric Adams (though the NYPD’s deployment of controversial specialized units goes back further). NSTs are tasked with seizing illegal guns. CRTs were originally focused on quality-of-life issues, but now engage in proactive policing like NSTs, the monitor reported. PSTs were disbanded in November of 2025, with some officers transferred to NST units.
Since the 2013 federal court ruling found that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional, the federal monitorship has been overseeing the department’s use of stop-and-frisk. This report is the fourth in the last three years that has raised concerns about constitutional violations by specialized units.
“The Department is well aware of the compliance issues it faces,” wrote monitor Mylan Denerstein. “These compliance benchmarks have long been known to the Department, as have the problems contributing to the NYPD’s failures. It is time for the Department to take ownership of its issues and solve them.”
Overall, the monitor found that 83% of stops, 69% of frisks, and 62% of searches conducted by specialized units in 2025 were lawful. The monitor had set compliance requirements at 85% for stops, frisks, and searches by the third quarter of 2025, and 90% by the end of 2025. The only time the NYPD met that goal was for stops during the third quarter of 2025.
In comparison, patrol officers and officers in other non-specialized units had lawful compliance rates of 94% for stops, 83% for frisks, and 79% for searches during 2025.
The monitor also found that the NYPD failed to audit the stops made by its CRT officers between 2023 and March 2026, violating court orders. A department spokesperson did not respond to the specific findings in the report, but said that the department would be reviewing it.
“The NYPD has gone from over 680,000 reported stops in 2011 to less than 30,000 in 2025. There is still more work to be done, and the NYPD continues those efforts in collaboration with the federal monitor and her team,” the spokesperson said.
The Legal Aid Society and the Legal Defense Fund reiterated their call for the units to be disbanded in response to the report. Karina Tefft, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society, said the report was disappointing but not surprising.
“This issue runs very deep. It’s been going on a long time, and we are far past the point of this needing to be corrected,” Tefft said.
“One of the most staggering statistics here concerns racial disparities. … While there were periods where the total volume of stops being conducted by NYPD had decreased, the real constant throughout that time has been significant disparities in the volume of stops of Black and Hispanic people,” she added.
Charles McLaurin, an attorney at the Legal Defense Fund, said the racial disparities are indicative of a flawed policing model. Specialized units are deployed to high crime areas, neighborhoods that often have predominantly Black and Brown residents, and directed to make self-initiated stops. AmNews recently reported on community concerns around Neighborhood Safety Teams in a series on gun possession enforcement.
“It’s really just exacerbating the distrust between communities of color and law enforcement…people are actually being harassed on a regular basis when they’re going to work, or when they’re going back to their homes, or when they’re leaving their homes,” McLaurin said, also noting that the extensive training specialized units received has failed to stem these issues.
“It’s just a testament to the fact that you can have all the training in the world, but that training is not necessarily a panacea and doesn’t fix a broken culture of unconstitutional policing,” McLaurin said.
Going forward, the monitor has set a benchmark of 90% lawful compliance for stops, frisks, and searches for the remainder of 2026. But McLaurin says that Mayor Zohran Mamdani can and should take more significant action.
“We think it would be appropriate for the [Mamdani] administration to step in and to make reforms as needed, because we don’t want to wait until the end of next year just to get a similar report, and I think that New Yorkers deserve better,” he said.
Tefft said that disbanding the units should be the minimum action taken, and that a further accounting of proactive policing strategy is needed.
“I think the structure of self-initiated stops is what allows a lot of the unconstitutional behaviors to flourish,” she said. “Even if the units ultimately were disbanded, we want to make sure that there’s a deeper analysis of the problems that are driving the constitutional noncompliance here to make sure that we don’t see the same issues just cropping up in another way with a new unit and a different name.”
It is unclear what, if any, action the city will take in response to the report. The Mamdani administration said that it would be reviewing the report, emphasizing the importance of constitutional policing.
“The Mamdani administration believes that constitutional policing, justice, and public safety must go hand in hand,” spokesperson Sam Raskin said. “We are reviewing the report closely and will continue working to ensure the Police Department keeps New Yorkers safe while upholding their constitutional rights.”
