Unconstitutional NYPD stops rise under Adams, monitor says
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The number of unconstitutional stops made by the NYPD has risen since Mayor Eric Adams took office, a report from a court-appointed monitor found. AP file photo by Seth Wenig
By Jacob Kaye
The number of illegal stops made by the NYPD has risen each year Mayor Eric Adams has been in office, a new report found.
Over a decade after a federal judge found that the NYPD was violating New Yorkers’ constitutional rights through their stop-and-frisk policing tactic, the once-declining practice has again begun to rise under Adams, a former police officer who first took office at the start of 2022.
According to the monitor appointed to track the NYPD’s compliance with a 2013 court order surrounding the department’s stop-and-frisk policies, both the number of unconstitutional and constitutional stops increased in both 2022 and 2023. The monitor also found that during that same time frame, the number of underreported stops increased.
But even as the number of illegal stops rose, high-ranking police officers did little to stem their rise and, in many cases, approved the allegedly unconstitutional interactions with New Yorkers.
“Despite training and proper policies, there are still too many…stops, frisks, and searches in violation of the law,” the monitor, Mylan Denerstein, said in the report filed with a federal judge on Wednesday.
While the monitor said that the NYPD has made a number of changes to its policies that bring it more into compliance with the judicial ruling, some of that progress stands to be canceled out by the rise in what the monitor said are unconstitutional stops.
Additionally, the monitor said the changes that have been made by the NYPD took too long.
“Few would have expected that it would take more than a decade for the NYPD to make the changes required to comply with the court’s orders,” the monitor said.
In 2013, a federal judge found that the NYPD had been routinely violating New Yorkers’ Fourth Amendment rights through its stop-and-frisk policy, which police officers were using without having any reasonable suspicion behind the stop.
The judge also found that the practice was in violation of New Yorkers’ Fourteenth Amendment rights, which guarantee equal protection under the law. A vast majority of the illegal stops were made against Black New Yorkers.
Though for several years the number of stops – known as Terry stops because of a U.S. Supreme Court case known as Terry v. Ohio, in which the court ruled that an officer must have reasonable suspicion of criminality before they can conduct a stop – and illegal stops were on the decline in the five boroughs, they have since begun to climb back up under Adams’ watch.
In 2020, there were a little more than 9,544 stops, according to the monitor. That number decreased by around 600 in 2021, the year before Adams took office.
In 2022, the number of reported stops rose to 15,102. The number of stops again rose in 2023, when nearly 17,000 stops were reported.
As the number of stops rose, so too did the number of unconstitutional stops, according to the monitor.
In 2021, around 16 percent of all stops were unconstitutional. That number jumped to nearly 24 percent in 2022, an over 50 percent increase.
In the first half of 2023, around 12 percent of all reported Terry stops were unconstitutional, according to the report, which did not include data from the second half of 2023.
As was the case a decade ago, a bulk of the improper stops are often made by the same small NYPD units.
Prior to the judicial ruling, a majority of the unconstitutional stops were carried out by plain clothes officers in search of illegal weapons – a vast majority of stops often ended without an arrest or criminal summons and often less than one percent resulted in a gun arrest.
The same was true in 2023, when the majority of unconstitutional stops were made by the NYPD’s Public Safety Teams and Neighborhood Safety Teams, which serve as an effective replacement for the plainclothes unit, which was disbanded under former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“The NYPD’s years-long failure to end the unconstitutional stops, frisks, and searches used to harass and abuse Black and brown New Yorkers is an absolute disgrace,” said Jennvine Wong, a supervising attorney at The Legal Aid Society.
“The fact that the department has done so little over the course of a decade to effect court-ordered reforms is inexcusable, and shows an utter lack of concern for the rights, dignity, and humanity of people of color,” Wong added. “NYPD leadership must commit to ending its racist and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices immediately, and must hold NYPD members at all levels accountable to this goal.”
But while the monitor raised concern over the number of illegal stops, they also touted work done by the NYPD to further its compliance with the court order that resulted from the 2013 ruling.
In addition to changes at the top of NYPD’s organizational chart the monitor said the department had taken “some major steps to monitor compliance with Terry stop, frisk and search policies procedures,” including a computer program to track stops and a compliance plan made to ensure the NYPD isn’t violating New Yorkers’ Fourteenth Amendment rights.
“Public safety and constitutional policing are both critical components of the NYPD’s mission, and members of the Department work tirelessly, every day, to keep people safe and to police fairly,” an NYPD spokesperson told the Eagle in response to the monitor’s findings.
“The Department is proud that New York remains the safest big city in America and of the reforms that it has made, which the Monitor has recognized,” the spokesperson added. “The NYPD is committed to working collaboratively with the Monitor to address the areas of concern raised in this latest report.”
