Going hand-to-hand with the NYPD over stop-and-frisk

By Alex Cotton

Is your name in a New York Police Department database? For 867,617 people, the answer is yes.

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NYPD has been entering the names of New Yorkers stopped by police into a searchable, electronic database since March 2006. Ninety percent (more than 450,000) of those people were neither arrested nor given a summons in 2006, raising legal questions about invasions of privacy. The NYCLU is also worried that these stops, known as stop-and-frisk operations, may have unfairly targeted black and Latinos. While printed records of the operations have been made public—with all personal information such as names omitted—the electronic database has not. To change that, the NYCLU filed a suit against the NYPD last Tuesday in the New York State Supreme Court.

The printed records, released in 2006, showed that stop-and-frisk operations had increased five-fold since 2002, and that a majority of those stopped were black. When that led to concerns of racial profiling, the NYPD submitted the database for review by the RAND Corporation, a private, non-profit research group. According to the NYPD, RAND’s inquiry was meant “to determine whether there are any flaws that we may need to address.”

For the next six months, both the City Council and the NYCLU petitioned the NYPD to release the databases, citing a 2001 law which requires the police to make such records public. When that failed, the NYCLU filed a Freedom of Information petition, which the NYPD also denied. The NYCLU’s next step was to file the lawsuit that is currently under review. The City Council remains hopeful that the NYPD will release the database on its own.

While the printed records are potentially suggestive of racial profiling, the NYCLU argued in its suit petition that “only a limited analysis of NYPD stop-and-frisk practices could be made using the printed reports, and that sophisticated analysis of the data would require direct access to the stop-and frisk database.”

Among the many reasons the NYPD listed for not turning over the database are that it would jeopardize stop-and-frisk operations, people’s privacy and the security of the database. In responding to charges racial profiling, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said that the data is “consistent with concentrations of crime and of victim descriptions of suspects.” The NYPD has also argued that stop-and-frisk procedures are necessary to keep crime down.

Similar concerns over stop-and-frisk practices erupted after the killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999. A subsequent investigation lead by then-State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer concluded that race had played an inappropriate role in police stops. A more recent study, conducted by Columbia University researchers in 2005, reached similar conclusions. According to a Police Department press release, the RAND Corporation’s analysis was expected to be completed this past September.