Over a decade after the New York City Police Department’s notoriously racist “stop-and-frisk” practice was ruled unconstitutional, officers who engage in it unlawfully are almost never disciplined. In a September 23 report, an independent federal monitor described the NYPD’s “inordinate willingness to excuse” officers who conducted unjustified stop-and-frisks, no matter how many times.
“Discipline for illegal stops and frisks, even when substantiated by [the Civilian Complaint Review Board], is not pursued with the same vigor and resolve as for other misconduct,” the report stated. “Penalties for wrongdoing … even when repeated, are rare.”
The NYPD did not respond to Filter‘s request for comment. CCRB, the city’s police oversight agency, declined, saying it was still reviewing the report.
Stop-and-frisk refers to detaining and searching someone simply because an officer decides they look suspicious. The NYPD has historically used stop-and-frisk to target young Black and Brown men. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that this violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment protection against racially discriminatory policing. Oversight measures for the practice, including the independent monitor, were ordered in an effort to prevent officers from abusing their power.
Since Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022, NYC has seen a resurgence of stop-and-frisk.
Stop-and-frisk peaked in 2011, at more than 685,000 people detained. Of those, 605,328—88 percent—were ultimately not cited or arrested. The practice declined in the years following the court ruling, reaching a record low of 8,947 in 2021. But since Mayor Eric Adams (D) took office in 2022, NYC has seen a resurgence of stop-and-frisk, with 16,971 incidents reported in 2023.
Yung-Mi Lee, a legal director at Brooklyn Defender Services, told Filter this owes to Adams—a former NYPD officer himself—reviving the department’s “anti-crime” unit. The plainclothes unit was implicated in killing Eric Garner in 2014, and disbanded in 2020 in the wake of the protests over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
“You can’t create a specialized unit that engages in dragnet policing where they stop everyone, violate their constitutional rights, and then justify their actions by saying, ‘We found a gun,’” Lee said. “It’s probably a gun in thousands of illegal searches. These encounters are humiliating and invasive.”
She said that today, there’s still no real way to hold officers accountable for misconduct. Filing a complaint with the CCRB is often too intimidating or inaccessible.
“I’ve seen many people who [file complaints] constantly targeted by police officers.”
“I’ve seen many people who have done so and are constantly targeted by police officers,” Lee said. “Then they have to go through the investigation process. If there is a recommendation for discipline by the CCRB, the commissioner routinely overrules that. Even though misconduct was found by the CCRB, the commissioner will ignore it and the officer is not held accountable.”
The new report, which runs over 500 pages, described this at length. In one example from 2018, camera footage showed an illegal stop-and-frisk in the Bronx by an officer who’d already undergone five trainings and been cited in 10 CCRB complaints. The police commissioner agreed that the officer’s actions were illegal, but overruled the CCRB, and rather than impose discipline simply directed the officer to undergo a sixth training. The same officer was named in three separate civil lawsuits that were settled for a total of $266,500.
“Police Commissioners, over time, have demonstrated an inordinate willingness to excuse illegal stops, frisks and searches in the name of ‘good faith’ or ‘lack of malintention, relegating Constitutional adherence to a lesser rung of discipline,” the report stated. “[B]e it sergeants or higher ranked officers… discipline for such failures is close to non-existent.”
Lee doesn’t see things changing, at least while Adams is in office.
“This is a mayor whose platform is ‘tough on crime,’” she said. “[In reality] it’s, ‘We’ll do whatever it takes even if we have to trample on people’s constitutional rights.’”
The public is invited to submit comment on the report through December 25.
Photograph via City of New York
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