(NewsNation) — Illegal police stops have risen in New York City under the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, according to a filing from a court-appointed monitor.
The report was filed in federal court with the monitor noting that the city was struggling to implement court-mandated reforms more than a decade after the stop-and-frisk policy was found unconstitutional by a federal court. It is not the first time the monitor has issued such findings.
In 2013, a judge found the warrantless program was unlawful. At its peak in 2012, more than 200,000 people were stopped and searched without warrants. Most were Black and Latino men and most had done nothing wrong.
The report comes two years after Adams, who ran as a tough-on-crime Democrat, revived specialized police units focused on getting firearms off the street.
Those Neighborhood Safety Teams and Public Safety Teams were responsible for about 54% of the unlawful stops in the first half of 2023, according to the monitor. The report also found that overall, the NYPD was conducting too many stops, frisks and searches with numbers increasing.
One example in the report noted that Black and Latino men, often wearing fanny packs, were stopped without reasonable suspicion, including by officers who would have been too far away to observe signs of a weapon through the fabric of the fanny pack.
The monitor also noted data from 2020 to 2023 was incomplete after a 2022 review of body-camera footage found police officers did not report around 31% of incidents where they stopped and searched someone with no resulting arrest.
The filing found that unconstitutional frisks rose to 23% in 2022 from around 16% in 2021 and unlawful searches increased to 30% in 2022 from 20% in 2021.
The monitor did note the department has instituted new training programs and changed policies regarding body cameras and auditing but also said there needs to be more done to properly supervise officers to ensure they are following the law.
