We're Still in the Stop-and-Frisk Era

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Brian Lehrer:

It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. The issue of stop-and-frisk has obviously come up in the news again since mayor Bloomberg entered the presidential race, so much so that you would think the issue locally has been completely resolved in the year since Bloomberg was mayor, but it hasn't. Now on this show, current mayor Bill de Blasio contrasted his record saying not only did he get rid of stop-and-frisk, but arrests are way down.

Bill de Blasio:

I mean, it's the antithesis of what we saw with Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly where young people were affronted constantly by the NYPD whether innocent or not, and under the stop-and-frisk policy treated very aggressively.

Brian Lehrer:

Mayor Bloomberg... Mayor Bloomberg. Mayor de Blasio on this show, but a new report by the federal monitor imposed in the stop-and-frisk court settlement to keep an eye on the NYPD and reporting by WNYC show that New York City has not fully closed the book on Bloomberg-era stops and the work is not over. With me now is WNYC reporter Yasmeen Kahn who has a two-part story on stop-and-frisk 2020 style. The first part is out today. Hi, Yas.

Yasmeen Kahn:

Hi.

Brian Lehrer:

So de Blasio often says he got rid of stop-and-frisk, but for those who don't know, the policy was ended because of a court order. Explain how this actually came about.

Yasmeen Kahn:

Yeah. Well, in 2013 a federal judge ruled that the NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk was racially discriminatory and unconstitutional, and she ordered a federal monitor and sweeping reforms. And stop started to decline actually a little bit before that, and there was just a lot of public pressure from advocates, from civil liberties group like the NYCLU. People had been starting to watch around that time how stops were just being conducted in such a high volume. I don't know if you remember in 2011 the police conducted a total of almost 700,000 stops, mostly black and Latino men.

Brian Lehrer:

That's when it got the most crazy and bloated.

Yasmeen Kahn:

Yes. And we had watched stops continue to go up for years. And honestly, the origin story of this, not to take you too far in the weeds, but it stretches back to Amadou Diallo. And there was a major stop-and-frisk case and a case on racial profiling before this case that was ruled on in 2013.

Brian Lehrer:

Which was more than 20 years ago, Amadou Diallo, so there are a lot of people who weren't here for that case, so don't remember. He was an unarmed, completely innocent person just trying to enter his building in the Bronx.

Yasmeen Kahn:

And ahead of that time... Right. And he was killed in a hail of 41 bullets by police officers. And advocacy groups and just people in neighborhoods of color on the ground were watching police stops go up around that time in leading up to the killing of Amadou Diallo. The point is, advocacy groups have been in this fight for a long time. Nobody wants to re-litigate this issue. Now the NYPD is under a monitor, and they have to make changes. And so people are trying to make sure that the changes are meaningful, that they are sweeping, and that they will have a lasting effect.

Brian Lehrer:

And so there's this monitor that was imposed as part of the court settlement that ended the stop-and-frisk program as it was. And you spoke to the federal judge who originally oversaw that case, Judge Shira Scheindlin, and she said she never imagined that this monitoring would still be going on today six years later. Why is it?

Yasmeen Kahn:

Well, I think at the time, because she felt like the monitorship covered a very specific issue around policing. It wasn't about reforming the entire department and rehiring officers or anything like that. It was about reforming stop-and-frisk, this one police tactic. But the monitor, by the way, who was a man named Peter Zimroth-

Brian Lehrer:

An actual person, human being.

Yasmeen Kahn:

He's an actual person, and he has a whole team of people working on this issue. There are a whole bunch of lawyers working on this issue. What has happened so far... His work, by the way, began in earnest in November, 2014, so we've got five full years of the monitorship going. The people at the table have basically had to create systems at the NYPD that did not exist before, meaningful systems of oversight. They've had to rewrite a whole bunch of policies, like new patrol guide sections on how to conduct a lawful stop-and-frisk, coming up with a legally accurate definition of racial profiling. All of these things had to be put down on paper that didn't exist before. Also loads and loads of training has happened.

Brian Lehrer:

So what's not happening that this monitorship is still going?

Yasmeen Kahn:

Well, so people have had to work for so long to sort of build up these systems and rewrite the procedural stuff. That's what's taken years so far. People are waiting to see how this plays out on the street, and they are eager for more reporting now, more meaningful analysis on whether the stops that are being conducted are lawful and if they're free of racial bias.

Brian Lehrer:

So the monitor report for 2019, which is the most recent one, shows that reported stops increased by more than 20% last year to nearly 13,500. Now that's not 700,000 like you just cited took place in 2011, but what does it suggest?

Yasmeen Kahn:

Well, it suggests that... Well, we know that stops are way down. Stops are down dramatically from those peak years of hundreds and hundreds of thousands. However, the monitor has cited repeatedly over the years that the police department is under-reporting stops. So officers are not reporting all stops. And I think people in communities were just very suspicious of those low, low numbers. In 2018, it was something like 11,000 stops. Keep in mind there are 22,000 police officers and sergeants alone. So those numbers were just suspiciously low and still are. And the monitor has said, his reports, there've been 10 of them so far, public reports, he uses very neutral language in them. But he has said very clearly that the NYPD will never be in compliance with court ordered reforms until it gets a handle on reporting of stops.

Brian Lehrer:

And you found an alarming stat in the data. The racial disparities in stop-and-frisk have not budged. In 2019, 88% of people stopped were black or Latino, which is up from 85% in 2013. So when you post these numbers to the city and to the police department, how do they defend them?

Yasmeen Kahn:

They defend them by saying that they have a shared goal of bias-free policing. The disparities alone don't necessarily mean bias, but that's why we need more meaningful reporting, an analysis on whether or not actual racism, racial bias is infecting police stops still.

Brian Lehrer:

And in the same vein, the courts ordered the NYPD to begin tracking and investigating complaints of racial profiling, and as of June, 2019, the police department had failed to substantiate a single claim.

Yasmeen Kahn:

That's right.

Brian Lehrer:

So is the monitor doing enough to demand court ordered information from the NYPD? Could they be doing more?

Yasmeen Kahn:

They definitely could be doing more. The monitor has been actually working... By the way, investigating racial profiling, just tracking racial profiling complaints, is one of those systems that the NYPD had to create that didn't exist before. And the monitor has been working, actually in his last report from December, has been working with the NYPD to come up with a better way to investigate these complaints. He actually got together a group of homicide detectives in the NYPD to ask them how to conduct better investigations around things. So that kind of work is happening behind the scenes, but it's certainly alarming that the NYPD has not substantiated any complaints of racial profiling. It's a red flag, at least.

Brian Lehrer:

Now, last month the New York State Attorney General, Tish James, announced an investigation into the NYPD "to determine if officers have illegally targeted communities of color on New York City subways through enforcement of Fare Evasion laws." The NYPD has still declined to hand data, including the number of cops assigned to each station, and the demographic breakdown of arrestees over to the DA, to the Attorney General. If the state AG can't get this kind of information, and if a federal monitor can't, what's next? How can they be held accountable?

Yasmeen Kahn:

Well, the federal monitor has been getting information, but I think just going to the point of that request, did that investigation by the AG... To talk about stop-and-frisk reforms, we can't just sort of isolate it to just the one police tactic. People make the point that stop-and-frisk is one tool of broken windows policing, so-called broken windows policing. So we have to talk about how NYPD tactics and how they view communities of color, and how we criminalize poverty, or how we maybe police low-level issues, how that sort of plays a role altogether, how it's all intertwined.

Brian Lehrer:

It's so hard to get it right, right? Because on the one hand, we have people arguing that the NYPD is pulling back too much, and bail reform pulls us back too much, and that's why crime is going up again a little bit in the city. And on the other hand, we have reform advocates arguing that they're not going far enough or they don't take it seriously enough. It's tough to get it right.

Yasmeen Kahn:

It is. And maybe that's one of the reasons why the monitor, Zimroth, would not be interviewed. He sees his role as being collaborative with both the NYPD and with the plaintiffs that are involved, with the goal, really, to create some change, to create some meaningful action here. So he has tried to maintain his neutrality in this.

Brian Lehrer:

What will people hear if they hear your two-part report on our website?

Yasmeen Kahn:

They're going to hear kind of... I'll take people through just what's changed and what hasn't so far with this monitorship. Tomorrow, also, I do a story on how community groups that really brought this case to the fore, how they want more of a say in how the reform process is going. They think that the monitor should be talking to people on the street to really learn whether or not stop-and-frisk has changed.

Brian Lehrer:

WNYC News police beat reporter, Yasmeen Kahn. Thank you so much.

Yasmeen Kahn:

Thank you.

 

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