The department's lag in releasing the numbers came to light after the
fatal shooting in November of another unarmed black man,
Sean Bell,
and has been seized on by civil rights advocates, academics and current
and former government officials. Mr. Bell's death was not related to a
stop-and-frisk operation, but it has become a valve for frustrations
over relations between the police and minority residents. But members
of the City Council said they had been requesting the material even before
the Bell shooting.
Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at
Columbia
University who studied the issue in 1999 for Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer,
then the attorney general, said he was not surprised that the number of
stop-and-frisks went up "during a period of no accountability."
But, he added, "it is an astonishing fact that stop rates went up by
500
percent when crime rates were flat." Police officials and a city lawyer
said there were several reasons the department had fallen behind in
releasing the numbers. Compiling the reports, they said, has been
hampered by antiquated technology, especially since the numbers have
risen. The department has been working to modernize its reporting
system, officials said, and has not been withholding the data
deliberately.
Some observers questioned whether producing data on street stops
remained on the department's front burner during the age of terrorism.
"I just don't think it's a priority," Dr. Fagan said of the data
collection.
The total number of stops includes cases in which the officers acted to
prevent what could have been terrorist activity, the police said. But
those stops are relatively rare, they said, and there is no separate
category for keeping track of them. Searches of subway riders' bags are
not considered stop-and-frisk encounters because people willing to
forgo
entry to the subway can decline them.
Joel Berger, who monitored matters of police conduct as an executive in
the city's Law Department from 1988 to 1996, said: "It is particularly
frightening that the Police Department is not following the statute
that
requires reporting on stop, question and frisks. It is the thing that
happens most often and most troubles people, and the failure to report
the numbers is, effectively, very alarming."
Mr. Spitzer first dug into the issue of street stops after the Diallo
shooting and found that Hispanics and blacks were being
disproportionately targeted. After adjusting for varying crime rates
among racial groups, his analysis found that blacks were stopped 23
percent more often than whites. Hispanics were stopped 39 percent more
often than whites.
In the wake of those findings, the city signed a law allowing the
Council to collect the Police Department's stop-and-frisk data on a
quarterly basis. Separately, the federal class-action lawsuit, Daniels
v. City of New York, alleged that the police habitually used racial
profiling in stop-and-frisk situations. When the city's corporation
counsel settled the case in January 2004, the agreement required the
police to disclose data on such encounters through 2007.
The idea was that increased transparency about police stops would not
only foster analysis of one of the department's most crucial tactics
for
reducing crime, but also would help restore the public's trust.
Mr. Spitzer's study reviewed police records known as UF-250s. Officers
must fill them out after making forcible stops, including those in
which
a person is frisked or searched. His report noted that officers did not
always fill them out. The form shows the race of the person stopped as
well as the reason.
Under a system begun in the spring of 1999, police officials said,
forms
completed at individual precincts were taken to 1 Police Plaza, where
their 50 points of data were gathered. Envisioning a daunting backlog,
Mr. Kelly in 2005 directed that the process be decentralized so that
the
raw data could be recorded quickly, at the precinct level.
Mr. Kelly told officials at the Jan. 24 hearing that the data for the
remainder of 2003, and for all of 2004 and 2005, would take longer to
provide. That is "because it must be compiled manually, rather than in
a
technologically advanced way," according to a letter sent Thursday from
the Law Department to a plaintiff in the federal case.
"We've been patiently waiting for years now," Councilman Vallone, told
Mr. Kelly at the hearing. "We would again request that you give us that
information."
For a time, the police gave the data to the City Council with some
regularity. But the frequency of the reports slowed, and in February
2006, the department released data for the third quarter of 2003.
Then, the flow of data stopped. Until yesterday.
But city leaders came under criticism as well for failing to more
forcefully demand the data. "The City Council has failed to ensure that
the Police Department is producing the reports, as required by the
statute," said
Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
"As a result, it has not been doing any monitoring of stop-and-frisk
activity, which was the very point of the statute."
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