Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell on Friday shot down a federal monitor’s damning report that the NYPD team responsible for keeping guns off the street has made a high number of unlawful street stops that predominantly target New Yorkers of color.
“100% I take exception (to the report),” Sewell said during an interview on NY1. “These reasonable suspicion stops are legal and effective, but they have to be done constitutionally.”
Earlier this week, Mylan Denerstein, a court-appointed watchdog overseeing the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics in years-old litigation, released a report that examined the constitutionality of stops, frisks and searches performed by “anti-crime” teams in modified uniforms disbanded by Mayor Bill de Blasio and resurrected by Adams last year when he took office.
The report found 24% of stops were unconstitutional.
“Too many people are stopped, frisked, and searched unlawfully,” Denerstein wrote in the Manhattan federal court filing. “At the precinct level, sergeants, lieutenants and commanding officers fail to identify and correct the unconstitutional policing.”
Mayor Adams’ first major policy announcement was to bring back an iteration of undercover cops like the NYPD’s disbanded anti-crime unit. The plainclothes cops were involved in some of the city’s most notorious police killings, including the 2014 chokehold death of Staten Island man Eric Garner.
Sewell refuted these findings Friday, claiming that she and her team looked at the same stops the monitor had and found that the “error rate was only about 18%” — far less than what Denerstein found.
The illegal stops occurred, Sewell said, because the NYPD’s Neighborhood Safety Teams mistakenly believed they had reasonable suspicion to conduct the stops.
“Our professional standards bureau weekly goes over the body-worn cameras in the Neighborhood Safety teams and brings them in to be able to have them articulate what they saw, what rose to the level of search and to be able to correct when we see these stops are being handled inappropriately,” Sewell said, adding that she and Mayor Adams are taking the monitor’s report “very seriously.”
Sewell challenged the report early on, saying in a statement Monday that “the department disagrees with the conclusions of the Monitor with respect to some of the encounters the team reviewed.”
Citing the results as “disappointing,” the federal monitor found the Neighborhood Safety Teams, who wear modified uniforms similar to security guards and ride in unmarked cars, to be the least compliant of all officers on patrol, and department oversight to be “inadequate at all levels.”
Despite the monitor’s report, Sewell said significant progress has been made in street stops since the height of the stop-and-frisk era.
“In 2011, which was the high watermark for stops – we were at 684,000 stops at that time. Last year, we had just over 15,000,” she said.
While the number of reported stops has fallen sharply since the nine-year-old litigation was brought, the Monitor discovered that racial disparities are as stark as ever. Of 419 encounters observed on body-worn cameras of people being stopped by police in 34 commands, 97% were Black or Hispanic; 92% were male.
Neighborhood Safety cops involved in self-initiated encounters had reasonable suspicion to stop people 69% of the time — meaning they stopped three out of every 10 people unlawfully. They had a legal basis for only 63% of searches. Out of 230 car searches, the teams recovered two weapons.
The monitor’s report reviewed stops between April 1 and October 30, 2022 and followed 205 Neighborhood Safety members including lieutenants, sergeants, and police officers.
The report notes that the NYPD has a different way of assessing the legality of stops. If a frisk is fruitful, the police department counts it as proper, even if the stop was unlawful. Of the 86% of searches precinct executives said were lawful, the monitor only found 46% to be so.
The increased number of stop-and-frisks don’t seem to be waning this year.
New 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.