Stop-and-Frisk Heads For a Record Year | www.thechief-leader.com | The Chief-Leader NYC Civil Service Newspaper

Stop-and-Frisk Heads For a Record Year

Bloody But Unbowed

By MARK TOOR

DONNA LIEBERMAN: ‘Not wise or effective policing.’ DONNA LIEBERMAN: ‘Not wise or effective policing.’ The NYPD is on track to pass its stop-and-frisk numbers from last year, according to Police Department figures for the first two quarters of 2010.

Police officers stopped 319,156 persons between Jan. 1 and June 30. If officers keep up that pace, they will stop 638,312 people by New Year’s Eve, 11 percent more than the 575,304 detained in 2009.

Attacked by NYCLU

Eighty-five percent of those stopped were black or Latino. Just 7 percent of those stopped were arrested, and another 7 percent were given summonses. That continues the trend of previous years, when most of those stopped were members of minority groups and were released without police action.

“The NYPD is on track to stop and interrogate a record number of totally innocent New Yorkers in 2010,” the New York Civil Liberties Union said in a statement Aug. 11.

“A practice that wastes an officer’s valuable time with a 90-percent fail rate—while at the same time humiliating hundreds of thousands of black and brown New Yorkers—is not a wise or effective policing technique,” said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director. “The NYPD is turning black and brown neighborhoods across New York City into Constitution free zones. It is not a crime to walk down the street in New York City, yet every day innocent black and brown New Yorkers are turned into suspects for doing just that.”

The Police Department has said it concentrates its stop-and-frisks in high-crime neighborhoods, many of which are heavily minority. It also says the stops are in rough proportion to the identity of criminals as described by their victim. In the first half of 2010, 72 percent of crime victims described their attackers as black or Latino, according to the police figures.

75th Precinct Leads City

By far, the precinct with the most stop-and-frisks was the 75th in East New York, Brooklyn, which has long been troubled by high crime. For the first half of this year, 12,251 people were stopped. The second-busiest precinct was the 115th in Queens, which includes Jackson Heights. Other busy Brooklyn precincts were the 79th, which includes Bedford- Stuyvesant, with 4,425 stops; the 70th, covering Flatbush and Ditmas Park, with 5,473; and the 73rd, in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, with 4,869.

Most Queens precincts, with the exception of the 100th, including the relatively quiet western Rockaways, approached or exceeded 4,000 stops. Most Bronx precincts exceeded 3,000 stops. In Manhattan, the busiest precinct was the 28th in Harlem, with 3,730 stops. The precinct numbers include stops by officers assigned to the precinct but not by Transit, Housing or Narcotics officers.

The NYCLU has opposed stop-andfrisk and has fought against the NYPD’s practice of keeping a database of people stopped as a source of suspects or witnesses in crimes. Governor Paterson signed a bill this summer ordering that the names of those not summonsed or arrested be deleted from the database. The NYCLU is su- ing to remove the names of those who were summonsed or arrested but not convicted of crimes.

Stop-and-Frisk Heads For a Record Year | www.thechief-leader.com | The Chief-Leader NYC Civil Service Newspaper.