The New York Police Department stopped and interrogated over 400,000 people in the first 9 months of the year, if the trend continues that would make an unprecedented 535,000 stops by the end of 2009 according to a study published by the New York Civil Liberties Union. In the following piece I explore the debate surrounding the controversial practice and the class action suit brought by several New Yorkers who say they have been the targets of an unjust policy.

Jonah Engle, December 18, 2009

New York - Lalit Clarkson stands outside a bodega on the corner of 169th Street and Walton Avenue in the Bronx. A big yellow sign in its tagged window lists sandwiches next to brightly colored ads for cigarettes. Three years ago, Clarkson, who was then a teacher’s assistant at the charter school across the street, was stopped by the police in this very spot. It was a warm January day. Dressed conservatively in a shirt and tie, Clarkson had come in on his lunch break to buy a bottle of water when, he says, two plainclothes officers followed him out of the store. They asked him where he was coming from. “‘This is a drug block and we saw you walking past a drug building,’” Clarkson says one of the officers told him. Clarkson explained that he had to walk down 169th to get from the Subway store, where’d he’d gotten a sandwich, to his school across the street. The officer then asked Clarkson if he had any contraband on him and if he could search him. Clarkson, who had two days earlier taken a “what to do when stopped by the police” class, answered that he didn’t have any contraband and that he did not consent to a search. Clarskon says the officers moved in closer and asked him a couple more times, again he refused. A small group began to form and the police left.

What happened to Clarkson is not unusual. Last year the NYPD stopped an questioned an average 1600 people a day. What is unusual is that Clarkson decided to sue.

He’s one of a handful of named plaintiffs in a class action suit against the City of New York and the Police Department brought by one of the country’s leading civil rights organizations, the Center for Constitutional Rights. At issue is whether the widespread use of stops by the police discriminates against racial and ethnic minorities.

As the result of a previous lawsuit that was settled in 2003, a federal judge ordered the NYPD to hand over its quarterly arrest data to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which then produced a study of over 1.6 million stops between 2005 and mid-2008. The findings: 81 percent of those stopped were black and Latino, though they make up 25 and 28 percent of the city’s population respectively. The researchers found other disparities as well. Once stopped, for instance, blacks and Latinos were far more likely to be frisked and have force used against them.

When the Police Department commissioned its own study from the RAND Corporation, the report found little evidence of racial bias. One factor explaining the disparity, says the study’s author Greg Ridgeway, is that when police are responding to a report of a crime, over 80 percent of the suspects are black or Latino according to victims or witnesses’ descriptions. Ridgeway, who spent time with officers on the beat, describes an incident he witnessed: Officers received a call about an assault committed by three Hispanic males. “Because of that one incident, 12 Hispanic males got stopped,” says Ridgeway. “They finally got the right people, but it went through nine other people who were wrong.” The RAND study also disputes the CCR’s findings about racial disparities in the rates of frisk and use of force. Controlling for the circumstances of the stop (such as time, location and the reason for the stop), makes the difference between whites and minorities much smaller – 33 percent of nonwhites who were stopped were frisked and 16 percent had forced used against them. The respective figures for whites were 29 percent and 15 percent.

But Darius Charney, one of the attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights who is prosecuting the case against the NYPD, counters that the vast majority of stops aren’t in response to a call describing a suspect, what’s going on is nothing less than racial profiling and suspicion-less tops. He sees something troubling behind the growing numbers of stops: that the NYPD employs a quota system that requires officers on certain patrols to log a minimum number of stops per shift. “They have denied it,” Charney says. “I don’t believe them, I’ll say that on the record.”

It’s a serious charge. Officers can only stop someone if they have “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity. Imposing a quota would require police to stop a predetermined number of people regardless of whether they had reasonable suspicion. “That would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment,” Charney points out.

The NYPD didn’t respond to numerous requests for an interview. But while the Department has denied any charges of racial bias or quotas, several former police officers readily admit that quotas exist.

Paul Bacon, who retired from the force in 2005, spent over a year on the Mobile Support Unit. The Unit covered Manhattan North, above 59th street and was based at the 19th precinct on the Upper East Side. But they didn’t spend much time there. “We always went uptown as a rule,” says Bacon who adds they focused on Spanish Harlem, Harlem and Washington Heights. Some weeks, he says, their only task was to go out and make a certain number of stops. “Nothing was more important that bringing in the right numbers,” Bacon says. “We lived every day with numbers.” That meant Bacon had to get creative. While the NYPD guidelines stipulate that an officer must have “reasonable suspicion” before stopping someone, Bacon says in reality the standard was much lower. “We could say they were exhibiting behavior indicative of acting as a lookout. That was almost any behavior you could think of,” he says. “We could say, ‘Oh well, he was hanging out by the door, that’s reasonable suspicion.’”

He and some other cops disliked the arbitrary targets, they often created ugly scenes between officers and people who resented being stopped on the street, he says. But Bacon thinks its quite possible this aggressive approach helped reduce crime in the uptown neighborhoods he patrolled.

Indeed a critical question beyond the constitutionality of these stops is their effectiveness in reducing crime.

The NYPD points to today’s historically low crime rates as justification for its methods. In the early 1990s, the NYPD, under police chief William Bratton adopted a set of new strategies that continue to this day. The “broken windows” theory states that a profusion of low level “quality of life” infractions like graffiti, or drinking beer on the street contribute to a general sense of lawlessness. In those environments more serious crimes flourish. The police deployed high numbers of officers to the precincts with the most crime and aggressively went after any misdemeanor. Stops and frisks have been a key component of that strategy.

Eli Silverman is professor Emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He studied the great drop in crime that occurred in New York City during the mid-90s. “It’s more to do with policing tactics than socio-economic changes and shifts,” he says. Along with broken windows policing, Silverman credits compstat, a tool which allows the NYPD to closely track the numbers of crimes and arrests in each precinct, as well as greater autonomy for precinct commanders. But Silverman acknowledges there is a debate among criminologists, “Of course there are others who will not give the police credit and will say there are these socio-economic factors at play.”

Professor Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago also looked at the decline in crime in New York City, but came to different conclusions. Harcourt says  remarkable drops in crime have occurred across the country over the past 15 years including in many jurisdictions which Harcourt says, “haven’t employed anything like the stop-and-frisk procedures or quality of life initiative that New York City has excelled in. So that really casts some doubt on the claims of the NYPD that it’s their particular brand of policing that’s doing the work.” Harcourt says his study of New York’s crime drop pointed to several other factors including an ebbing of the violent crack epidemic, demographic factors and increased incarceration.

While experts argue about whether the NYPD’s widespread use of stop-and-frisks are racially biased or whether they are to be credited for the greater safety enjoyed by New Yorkers, what’s not in doubt is that young black and Latino men are bearing the brunt of this tactic. And some say this is undermining their relationship with the police.

Lalit Clarkson said that when officers tried to frisk him outside the bodega in 2006, it didn’t occur to him to file a complaint; he’d been stopped by the police on the street 10 times before. “The first time it happened,” Clarkson says he was 13, “I was scared as shit.”

Clarkson says he was crossing the street by himself. “The police officers pull the car, hop out the car, guns drawn and say ‘get up against the wall.’” Clarkson says they told him to lift his shirt up and turn around. They searched his pockets and found nothing. He asked them why they had stopped him, the police answered that his yellow and black bubble jacket had gang colors. Over time he says the stops became normal, more of a nuisance than anything else. “If a random person in the street tells you to put up your shirt and turn around,” Clarkson says, “and puts their hands on your pockets and feels up on your balls and stuff, you’d knock the shit out of them. A police does it, you like oh, its just another Thursday night.”

Noel Leader served over 20 years with the NYPD and retired in 2006 as a sergeant. As a founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement he leads workshops on what to do when stopped by the police. He says lately he can hardly keep up with the demand. “We probably get a good 22 requests a month,” Leader says. “We probably honor only 8 or 9 of them.” He says when he leads the seminars 90 to 95 percent of participants say they have been stopped by the police. And just as many he says, hate the police. Leader says this is unnecessary – a tragic consequence of misguided police policy.

“It’s really causing more friction,” says Leader. “Young people …should really respect police officers and appreciate them and feel free to come up to them for assistance. That’s not what’s happening,” Leader says.