Study finds street stops by N.Y. police unjustified in tens of thousands of stops over six years.
Tens of thousands of times over six years, the police stopped and questioned people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing so, a new study says.
And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.
The study was conducted on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s stop-question-and-frisk policy. The department denies the charges.
The study examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009 that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk them, a crime-fighting strategy the department has put more emphasis on over the years.
Professor Fagan found that in more than 30 percent of stops, officers either lacked the kind of suspicion necessary to make a stop constitutional or did not include sufficient detail on police forms to determine if the stops were legally justified. The study also found that even accounting for crime patterns in the city’s various neighborhoods, officers stopped minorities at disproportionate rates.
Nearly 150,000 of the stops — 6.7 percent of all cases in which an officer made a stop based on his own discretion, rather than while responding to a radio call in which some information had already been gathered — lacked legal sufficiency, the study concluded.
Stops were considered unjustified if officers provided no primary reason articulating a reasonable suspicion for the stop.
For example, if an officer conducted a stop solely because a person was in a high-crime area — without listing a primary reason, like the person “fits a description” of a crime suspect or appeared to be “casing” a store — the stop was considered unjustified.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/nyregion/27frisk.html?_r=3&hp