CITY ROOM
Waiting for the Latest Stop-and-Frisk Figures
By AL BAKER
February 11, 2010, 1:21 pm
A panel of analysts, academics and former police officials is poised to debate one of the New York Police Department’s most controversial policies – “Stop, Question and Frisk” – at a summit at the city’s Bar Association offices.
Many believe the timing could not be better.
As of early Thursday, people were still waiting for the department to produce its anticipated quarterly report about how many New Yorkers have been stopped on the streets by police officers in the last three months of 2009 – a final piece of data that is necessary to determine the overall number of street stops in all of 2009.
By all accounts, it is likely to be a record-breaking year.
There were about 450,000 stops in the first three-quarters of 2009, from Jan. 1 through Sept. 30. That was up from around 391,000 stops in the same period in 2008, a 15 percent increase.
And last year’s tally of 531,159 stops – up from 468,932 in 2007 – already represents the most voluminous amount of stops in any 12-month period in the years since the Police Department began reporting the data.
The department is required to release to the City Council, four times a year, basic data about the people who are stopped and questioned by officers, and the reasons for such encounters. Due 30 days after a quarter ends, the report for the last quarter of 2009 was due at the beginning of February.
“The department routinely manipulates the timing of its release of the stop-and-frisk reports to minimize news reporting about the numbers,” said Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which monitors the data. “Invariably, they produce the reports to the City Council very late in the day and usually on Friday evenings.”
The guidelines for outside oversight of the data were set forth in a city law signed in 2001, and which sprang from public outrage over the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler.
Race is one prism through which to view the data.
About 82 percent of those stopped in the first three quarters of 2009 were black or Hispanic. According to figures from the Center for Constitutional Rights, blacks were stopped 239,244 times in the first three-quarters of 2009; Latinos were stopped 140,697 times; and whites, 42,053 times.
Another prism through which to analyze the data is determining how many arrests the street stops produce.
For example, the number of arrests that emanated from the stops in the first three-quarters of 2009 was 26,813, and the number of summonses was 28,705, according to Center for Constitutional Rights.
A third prism for understanding the data is the rationale for the stops.
It used to be that officers had to write the reason for the stop on a police form – known as a UF-250 – that officers are required to fill out after each stop. Explaining the legal rationale for any stop, in their own hand, allowed officers to demonstrate an understanding of the law they could easily articulate and communicate.
But the current UF-250 forms include 10 options with boxes to be checked under the question: “What Were the Circumstances Which Led to a Stop? (must check at least one box).” The new method, akin to a multiple-choice test, can inoculate officers from any criticism over possibly faulty reasoning.
The top two categories checked?
“Furtive Movements” and, “Actions Indicative of ‘Casing’ Victim or Location,” said Darius Charney, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which sued the city in federal court in 2008, charging that it has a policy of conducting unconstitutional stop-and-frisks and singles out ethnic minorities.
Police officials have said that while a large percentage of the street stops involve blacks, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims. A departmental study of crime in the first six months of 2009, “Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City,” includes information on the race and ethnicity of crime victims and suspects, broken down by crime category.
Such a study is produced every six months and the recent one highlights how, in many categories of crime, victims and suspects are most frequently black or Latino.
Police officials believe it is faulty to compare the number of street stops with the city’s population figures for race and ethnicity. Rather, they believe stop-and-frisk activity should be analyzed against data about crime-prone populations.
At the Bar Association summit, the panelists will explore the issues of whether the department’s stop-and-frisk polices are effective, fair and appropriate. The moderator will be Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The summit is March 9 at the Bar Association offices, 42 West 44th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, according to Eric Friedman, a spokesman.
Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie… and policing.
City policing and Major League Baseball have some long-established links.
Dan Mullin, who worked 23 years with the New York Police Department before retiring as a deputy chief, is the league’s senior director for security operations.
In 2008, when the baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, set up a department of investigations to look into allegations of illegal drug use by players, he tapped Mr. Mullin to lead the new effort.
The latest nexus between baseball and the Police Department – which is beset by its own thorny issues regarding steroid testing among officers – is that the department has been contracting with Gary Green, a doctor at the University of California Los Angeles and the top drug-testing consultant to Commissioner Selig.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly last year added steroids to the list of substances police officers are tested for. Reached by phone on Tuesday, Dr. Green was fairly tight-lipped about his work for the department.
He called himself a consultant to the police, but could not immediately say when his work began. He said he was not aiding in the writing of any policy, but is helping people in the department to understand the results of certain medical tests.
“When you get test results back, it is not black and white,” Dr. Green said. “A lot of interpretation has to be done.”
Dr. Green said he did not “want to do anything that will jeopardize any investigations,” stressing that consultants for law enforcement are not always privy to all aspects of such matters. He referred further questions to Julie L. Schwartz, the department’s legal advocate. She, in turn, referred queries to a departmental spokesman, who said it was “not unusual” for the department to hire consultants in such matters.
Following up…
1 Police Plaza reported recently that John C. Liu, the newly elected city comptroller, had beefed up his security detail – doubling the number of police officers assigned to him at all times.
Now comes word that Christine Leung, a retired member of the New York Police Department, has joined the comptroller’s office as a part-time, $40-an-hour planning coordinator in charge of security and safety.
In an interview, Ms. Leung said she took the job on Jan. 4, and hoped her policing experience would be a plus. Her duties include coordinating with the department’s Intelligence Division, which determines security staffing for public officials, and helping plan logistics and travel for Mr. Liu. She will also meet with security officials at the places that her new boss visits.
Ms. Leung, who was born in Hong Kong, worked in the Major Case Squad and retired form the Police Commissioner’s office in May 2004, a little more than 20 years after she joined the force in January 1984.
But many people might recall her from the documentary film, “Tea and Justice,” which chronicled the experiences of Asian women officers. “It is a serious documentary,” she said of the film, adding that she had departmental permission to do the work at the time.
WANTED: Former Police Commanders
The New York Civil Liberties Union wants to hear from former police commanders following a report by The New York Times over the weekend that more than 100 retired senior officers said in a survey they were aware crime statistics were manipulated because of the pressure to improve performance year after year.
Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the civil liberties group, digested the findings of the survey, which was done by two criminologists who are writing a book about the department’s CompStat program, and then analyzed Civilian Complaint Review Board reports about instances of the police refusing to process people’s complaints about crime.
There were 617 such complaints from 2004 to 2008, the most recent year for which there are data, Mr. Dunn said. Of those fully investigated, the review board validated the complainant in 10.7 percent of the cases, a higher than usual substantiation rate for all cases.
But beyond the numbers, Mr. Dunn said the civil liberties group was “interested in receiving reports from current or recent members of the department, to gauge the extent to which the police are systematically refusing to take complaints as a way to suppress crime figures.”
On the Hunt
And on the crime front, detectives are gathering clues in a two-week-old case of a man’s murder in a jewelry store holdup on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
No arrests have been made in the killing of Henry Menahem, 71, a worker at R. S. Durant, a jewelry store on Madison Avenue, who was shot as he worked in the store at midday on Jan. 27, the police said.
But “we’ve recovered some of the jewelry,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. He said investigators were “talking to someone in connection with the robbery.” But he stressed that he was not describing anyone as a suspect in the case.
Al Baker, police bureau chief for The New York Times — and the son of a police lieutenant — brings you inside the nation’s largest police force every Thursday. He will occasionally be joined by other reporters for The Times. He can be reached at .