Bill Requiring Recording of Police Stops is About Accountability
David R. Jones, La Nueva Mayoria / The New Majority
Last month, the New York City Council took the step of overriding Mayor Adam’s veto on legislation to support police transparency. 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.
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.
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.”
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 (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years. The views in this column are solely those of the writer. The New Majority is available on CSS’s Web site: www.cssny.org.