By Rocco Parascandola
Newsday
NEW YORK — The NYPD is on course to stop and frisk a record number of people this year - more than 580,000 — after a year in which accusations of racial profiling led to a noticeable drop in the practice.
The City Council released the latest numbers yesterday for the first quarter of 2008. According to the statistics, 145,098 people were stopped in the first three months of this year, compared with 109,855 for the last quarter of 2007.
That’s an increase of 32 percent and it’s the most stops conducted in any one quarter since at least 2002, when the NYPD began supplying the City Council with quarterly stop-and-frisk updates.
“They’re back to doing what they’ve been doing, which is stopping and frisking as many people as they can,” said Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The controversy hit a peak last February when the council revealed that NYPD officers in 2006 stopped more than 508,000 people on the street and questioned them.
A furor of criticism followed, with police accused of routinely stopping blacks and Hispanics without good reason. The number of stops dropped in the following months and the year ended with about 40,000 fewer stops than in 2006.
In statistics released yesterday, blacks comprised 54 percent of those stopped in 2007 and 51 percent for the first quarter of this year. For Hispanics, the numbers were 31 percent last year and 32 percent so far this year.
City Councilman Peter Vallone, chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said he was surprised by the increase, given the headlines generated when the 2006 numbers were released last year and the spotlight on the relationship between the NYPD and minorities during the Sean Bell shooting trial.
A police spokesman, Assistant Chief Michael Collins, said stopping and questioning people “is an essential law enforcement tool” that is a byproduct of what officers encounter on patrol, not a way to stop minorities.
Copyright 2008 Newsday