By Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso
Stop-and-frisk is on the rise in New York City.
That may come as a surprise to you, considering it’s been more than a decade since a federal court found the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional. Yet, under the Adams administration, the infamous practice is not only rising — it’s at its highest since 2015.
Luckily, there is legislation currently before the City Council that can bring transparency to the NYPD’s most common interactions with our communities. The How Many Stops Act would help us hold officers accountable for unlawfully stopping, searching, and questioning people and provide transparency around discriminatory policing practices.
Right now, the NYPD is only required to report on “Level 3 stops” — what we would call “stop-and-frisks.” This means that all other categories of street stops and investigative encounters — Level 1 and 2 stops — are entirely unreported. And while the NYPD may make a distinction between Level 1, 2, and 3 stops, for everyday New Yorkers, these levels are meaningless. They are frightening, disruptive, and — in the worst cases — can escalate to brutality, or even death.
The How Many Stops Act would require the NYPD to report on all pedestrian stops and investigative encounters, providing transparency into the NYPD’s most common enforcement activity with New Yorkers.
This bill, of course, does not require officers to report on typical human interactions between police officers and community members, and only requires reporting on formal police stops and investigative encounters in which officers have objective credible reason or a higher legal level of justification for the action.
For example, saying hello, having casual conversations with community members, and ordering a coffee do not constitute a stop and would not necessitate a report. But for all formal police stops, officers would have to disclose the demographics of the person they stopped, the reason they stopped them, the location of the encounter, and whether the encounter led to use of force, a ticket, or an arrest.
The How Many Stops Act is a commonsense, doable reform — and in the age of smartphones, this kind of reporting can be done in a matter of seconds with no meaningful added burden to police. This is real transparency, without any real burden — and I think we can all agree that it can only help build better trust between police and the communities they patrol.
The How Many Stops Act would specifically build on the protections provided by the Right to Know Act, a package of police reforms that included the Consent to Search law, a bill I sponsored as a member of the City Council.
Passed in 2017, the Right to Know Act requires that when the NYPD seeks to search you without legal justification, they must a) ask for your consent; b) inform you that a search will not happen without your consent; c) provide language interpretation services if you have limited English proficiency; and d) receive your “voluntary, knowing, and intelligent” consent before they perform the search.
The How Many Stops Act strengthens the Right to Know Act by requiring the NYPD to fully report on its use of these consent searches, including when those searches are declined and whether interpretation services are accessed.
Under Mayor Adams, the How Many Stops Act has gone from critical to urgent. A recent report from the NYPD’s federal monitor shows a troubling rise in racially disparate and unconstitutional stops by the NYPD, with at least 24% of the stops made by the mayor’s so-called Neighborhood Safety Teams (NSTs) found to be unconstitutional.
These NSTs are no more than a revamp of the infamous NYPD Anti-Crime Unit, a unit defined by aggressive policing tactics, hostile relationships with civilians, and a disproportionately high number of fatal shootings by officers until it was disbanded in 2020 amid nationwide calls for police accountability.
In Brooklyn, we have these NSTs in nearly 40% of our precincts. From 2021 to 2022, reported stops in these precincts climbed by almost 50%. And don’t forget — these percentages are based only on stops the NYPD is required to report. They don’t account for the many other stops that the How Many Stops Act would document.
The How Many Stops Act is a commonsense measure that will give us the full picture we need to advance police reform in the future while strengthening the accountability measures we’ve already fought for and won.
For the sake of transparency, accountability, and safety, the Council must not miss their chance to pass this critical legislation. And when the bill arrives on the desk of the mayor — who has failed to keep his promise of holding abusive officers accountable — he can and should take a first step in the right direction by signing this legislation into law.