The number of stop-and-frisk searches continues to plunge through the floor, while the crime rate continues to drop, the New York Civil Liberties Union said Tuesday.
In the first six months of the year, cops made 7,636 stops, the lowest number since reporting began in 2004, the civil rights group said.
Meanwhile, bellwether crime indicators, including murders, shootings and the overall crime rate, continued to decline in the same period.
The figures are a far cry from the period that Ray Kelly was police commissioner, when stop and frisks climbed above 600,000 and became a rallying point for the police reform movement.
In the first six months of 2011, when Kelly was still the city’s top cop, nearly 320,000 innocent people were stopped.
“As we finally move beyond stop and frisk, we hope the rest of the country spares itself the damage and learns from New York City’s mistakes,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU.
She noted that no less a bigot than Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump previously praised the stop-and-frisk campaign, saying the tactic worked “incredibly well” in the city.
In fact, the city had to settle a class action lawsuit that charged the program violated the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers.
For the first time, the NYPD had to accept a court-appointed monitor, as a result.
The new data, according to the NYCLU, suggests that fewer stops means more effective stops.
Between 2004 and 2012, fewer than 10% of all stops yielded an arrest. In the first three months of 2016, the percentage doubled, to 20.5%.
Through Oct. 2, the city’s overall crime rate was down 3.06% — or 76,041 major crimes in 2016 versus 78,444 in 2015.
Murders were down by 2.6% — a difference of 7 homicides — or 265 versus 272. Robberies were down 7%, with 11,538 in 2016 versus 12,406 in 2015.
Shootings are also down by 10.6%, with 790 so far in 2016 versus 884 in 2015.
In remarks Tuesday to the Association for a Better New York, current Police Commissioner James O’Neill said the NYPD is trying to address “the alienation of some communities.”
“We changed CompStat to no longer drive ever-higher numbers of stops, arrests and summonses — and instead distinguish those individuals who are a threat from those who are not,” he said.
“We know that it’s only a small percentage of the population that commits most of the violent crime. And that’s the group we’ve been homing in on with laser-like precision policing.”
O’Neill noted that arrests and summonses are also down by 20% — all part of a larger trend of a decline in the number of police contacts with the public.
The NYCLU pointed out that racial disparities persist even as stop-and-frisk and crime numbers drop.
Black people still accounted for more than half the stops in 2016, though they make up less than 25% of the population.
“The most recent numbers once again confirm that the dramatic reduction in stops is not jeopardizing public safety. Indeed, as stops have plummeted, crime has continued to fall in New York City,” said Chris Dunn, associate legal director of the NYCLU.
“We remain concerned about the stubborn racial disparities but are encouraged by the huge drop in the number of innocent blacks being stopped.”
