In the latest report on NYPD compliance with its obligation to prevent illegal stop-and-frisk tactics, Monitor Mylan L. Denerstein was less than impressed. The document, released on Monday by the monitor and her team, is the 23rd such report since a federal court declared the police department’s longtime approach to be unconstitutional in 2013, and is essentially an audit of NYPD stop data from 2023.
It focuses particularly on specialized teams known as Neighborhood Safety and Public Safety Teams (NST and PST, respectively). Both use unmarked cars with a focus on targeted enforcement against things like guns, and are essentially rebranded versions of notorious earlier units known most recently as the Anti-Crime Units (of which Daniel Pantaleo, who killed Eric Garner in 2014, was a part).
To understand the report, first you have to understand that, as established by years of case law, cops are generally speaking allowed to stop you if they have an articulable reason to do so, frisk you if there is a reason to fear that the officer might be in danger (i.e. there might be reason to think a suspect is armed), and search you if there is sufficient reason to escalate that frisk further(i.e. the frisk discovers something that seems like it might be a weapon). So the practice of stopping, frisking, and searching people is not per se unlawful, but doing so without a legal rationale for each discrete escalation certainly is; cops cannot simply jump out and frisk you like they used to.
Denerstein’s audit, which used randomized stop data from a sample of NST and PST units paired with body-worn camera footage, found that, while regular patrol units hit a legal threshold for their stops 92% of the time, NST and PST units — which unlike patrol mostly self-initiated their own stops — were stopping people legally only 75 and 64% of the time, respectively. Going beyond stops, the NST units fulfilled their legal obligations only an abysmal 58% of the time for frisks and 54% of the time for searches, meaning that nearly half of the time the units were escalating to a frisk, they had no basis to do so.
It’s worth noting that this doesn’t come as much surprise to police reform and community advocates, who had expressed heavy concerns when Adams, then borough president and mayoral candidate, first floated the possibility of reanimating some form of the specialized and formerly plainclothes units. This was less than a year after former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea had flashily announced their dissolution, calling them an outdated model of policing that was holding the department back. Within months of taking office in 2022, Adams reestablished them under the new NST name, insisting that better training and wearing identifiable uniforms would address the concerns around an approach that had long come to be synonymous with police abuses.
As with many of the issues that have plagued an NYPD now at the center of a corruption maelstrom — driven by what seems like an unchecked boys’-club atmosphere at the higher echelons — this seems driven by lack of accountability and oversight within the department. Denerstein pointed out that command-level supervisors, tasked with ensuring that officers under their command are complying with the law, were effectively rubber-stamping stop-and-frisk reports without review. Of the 215 stop reports that the monitoring team reviewed, supervisors had signed off on the legality of 213 of them, or over 99%. Of the 160 frisks that supervisors looked at, they gave the thumbs up to all but one.
There were also a number of instances where the supervisors simply didn’t bother to make a determination at all; for ten frisks and 28 searches, they simply wrote “NA” even though body-worn footage showed that the frisks and searches had taken place. To drive the point home, the monitoring team also pointed out that supervisors had also done the inverse: assessed the legality of eight frisks and 23 searches that hadn’t actually happened, which “raises serious questions about what the supervisor is doing,” a question made even more acute by the fact that the supervisor was often physically present during the stop.
Denerstein doesn’t ultimately answer this question outright, but she makes her theory clear by pointing out that many of the reports use “boilerplate language” that seems copy-pasted from one report to the other and often does not actually correspond to what can be seen on the body cameras. For example, she pointed out one NST officer who had written in two reports, months apart, that a suspect’s “pocket slapped his body” in an unusual way, and that the pocket seemed to contain a metal object with the shape, size, and weight of a firearm. A review of the footage, though, showed people in heavy winter coats without any particular indication that there might be a gun in the coat.
The implication here is that specialized unit officers have learned what kind of language to use to have their stops, frisks, and searches pass legal muster, regardless of what actually happened, and supervisors are content to sign off without bothering to check whether the reports are accurate or even whether the frisks and searches even actually happened. After all, why should they? It’s been over a decade since the stop-and-frisk ruling was reached, the teams were disbanded and then reinstated as substantially the same thing by an ex-cop mayor who made public safety the cornerstone of his campaign and launched this as a signature, personally important initiative.
The fish rots from the head, as they say, and recent NYPD leadership has left it rather clear that accountability for officers was a secondary concern if it was one at all. Now, whenever I write about NYPD conduct or accountability, I can almost hear in my head the recriminations from people prone to interpret a push for oversight as in some way anti-police, but there’s a specific reason that this tends to be a reflexive association. Police unions and officials have long driven the idea that to do their jobs properly, cops have to be to some extent above the laws they’re charged with enforcing; constraining them or even questioning things like their massive budgets and potentially discriminatory enforcement is hampering their ability to keep us all safe.
This is not and never has been true; unaccountability makes police worse at their jobs, secure in the knowledge that they won’t have to justify themselves to local government or voters. Among other things, the sense that the cops are out to get them prevents targeted communities from wanting to actually cooperate in enforcement, and stop-and-frisk is essentially the banner policy for how to alienate people in a patently discriminatory way.
Denerstein notes that 95% of stops where race was recorded involved Black or Hispanic people, and the worst rate of legal compliance was in the Bronx. Towards the end of her report, she makes clear that she views 100% compliance as the objective, but needs to see at least 90%compliance force-wide by the end of the year, or she “may recommend further action to the Court.” In the end, the NYPD might join the Department of Correction, Rikers Island-style, in finding itself at the business end of a contempt order.
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