Street and car stops by NYPD officers rose in the first three months of 2023, according to NYPD data that also shows an increase in the number of minorities questioned and in the number of police encounters involving innocent people.
The new statistics prompted the NYPD to again defend its use of street stops just a day after a report by a federal court monitor of the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics concluded that Neighborhood Safety Teams established by Mayor Adams stopped and illegally searched too many people, mostly Blacks and Latinos, in their quest to seize illegal guns.
The data issued Tuesday, which the NYPD is required to provide to the City Council quarterly, shows officers made 4,153 stop, question and frisk stops citywide in the first three months of 2023 — the highest quarterly total since the last three months of 2015.
Roughly 70% of those stopped are Blacks or Black Hispanics, the data shows. Another 23% are white Hispanic, and 6% are white.
Police made many more motor vehicle stops — 195,789, the data shows. At the pace reported in the first quarter of 2023, the number of vehicle stops for the entire year would surpass the 2022 total year number of 673,120.
Black and Latino drivers made up 62% of the total number of drivers stopped, the NYPD data shows — even though they comprise about 49% of vehicle commuters in the city, according to U.S. Census data cited by the NYCLU.
Of the 4,892 arrests made following vehicle stops, 4,135 were of Blacks and Latinos — 86%.
Whites, who represent about 34% of vehicle commuters, were pulled over 22% of the time, with 340 arrests made.
Police sources said stops are often based on eyewitness descriptions of suspects.
But the New York Civil Liberties Union said the statistics suggest the NYPD is moving back toward more and more stops, with fewer white people stopped and fewer overall stops resulting in someone getting arrested or given a summons.
“The increases are no surprise given the administration’s embrace of aggressive policing,” said Christopher Dunn, the NYCLU’s legal director. “What is surprising, and alarming, is how quickly stops are reverting to the bad old days of extreme racial profiling and rampant stopping of people who have done nothing wrong.
“Pumping up bad stops accomplishes nothing beyond poisoning police-community relationships.”
The number of stop-question-and-frisk stops remain far lower than a decade ago.
Cops stopped 686,000 people in 2011, an all-time high, data shows. Two years later, in 2013, Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics violated the rights of minorities and called for a monitor to oversee reforms.
The percentage of stops involving people not accused of any crime has fallen steadily over the years, from from about 90% more than a decade ago to nearly 60% recently, the NYCLU notes.
But in the first quarter of 2023, some 70% of those stopped were innocent of any charges, up 8% from the prior two quarters, Dunn said.
Car stop data has been made public since the start of 2022 following the passage of a law designed to prevent racial profiling.
The vehicle stop and stop-question-and-frisk numbers are in line with a rise in arrests and summonses and a renewed focus over the last year on broken windows policing, said several police sources.
So far this year, arrests citywide are up 20%, to 95,497 from 79,295 in the same period last year. And criminal court summonses, mainly for low-level offenses, are up 93%, to 40,785 from 21,095.
Police have “increased the numbers of arrests by focusing on the drivers of crime, which has resulted in historically high gun arrests and the corresponding seizure of firearms off our city streets,” NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said in a statement.