By Rocco Parascandola
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — NYPD officers documented less than 2,000 street encounters during the first three months of this year, city stop and frisk data reveals.
The 1,931 stops put the NYPD on pace to record less than 8,000 such encounters this year.
That would be an all-time low — down dramatically from the record 686,000 in 2001.
Just last year there were 9,544 stops in 2020, when the citywide COVID-19 shutdown kept millions of New Yorkers inside for much of the year.
The controversy surrounding stop, question and frisk, which critics say cops use to target minorities, started to die down when Bill Bratton became police commissioner under Mayor de Blasio in 2014.
Stops, which had already dropped to 192,000 in the last year of the Bloomberg administration — when a federal monitor was named to oversee various reforms — have decreased every year since then, except for in 2019.
The racial breakdown of those stopped, meanwhile has more or less remained the same each year, with 85% to 90% of those stopped identified as Blacks and Latinos
The NYPD denies it racially profiles and says its precision policing, focusing on the known violent offenders, has moved away from mass enforcement.
Sgt. Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokeswoman, noted that even as stops plummet, “the NYPD has made a record number of gun arrests this year, with gun arrests through May rising to 1,917 compared with 1,497 in the same period a year ago, a more than 28 % increase.
“With its innovative enforcement paradigms, the NYPD will continue using its intelligence-driven approach to focus on areas experiencing disproportionate violence and ensure the kind of constitutional, biased-free policing that is foundational to building community trust and maintaining public safety,” she added.
But Christopher Dunn, legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said it’s important to note that the monitor has previously reported that police are not noting all stops, “which means these numbers are unreliable.
“The NYPD needs to make sure all stops are documented,” Dunn said.
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