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New Law Would Force NYPD To Stop Saving Stop and Frisk Data
By
John Del Signore
Published May 24, 2010
Modified May 24, 2010
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By
John Del Signore
Published May 24, 2010
Modified May 24, 2010
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At a rally at City Hall yesterday, the NYCLU joined Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and state Senator Eric Adams to announce new bills that would ban the NYPD's practice of saving personal data of than 100,000 people who are stopped, questioned, frisked, and then released each year. The legislation comes on the heels of an NYCLU class action lawsuit against the city, which would force the NYPD to seal all personal records of people who were stopped and frisked but whose cases "ended either in dismissal or only the payment of a fine for a noncriminal violation." Yesterday Adams (he of the Stop the Sag crusade) compared the NYPD's stop and frisk fever to Arizona's illegal immigration law:
We're not stating that the use of stop and frisk is bad practice when it's used properly and legally. A good stop and frisk is if a civilian indicates that some crime has taken place or an officer is observing someone in a criminal action... The second is when an officer is told to get a predetermined number of stop and frisks at the beginning of his tour, or when no one is complaining of crime, he merely stops an individual and searches him... That is a bad stop and frisk.
This is racism 101. 80% of these stops are black and Hispanic. 9 out of 10 didn't commit any criminal action at all. The database should be used to stop bad people, not black people... We are not the northern Arizona.
Watch more from Adams's press conference here; during his remarks he refers to a man who's started carrying around a hidden camera to document all the NYPD stop and frisk action in his neighborhood. That would be YouTube user Nycresistance, who even documented his own harrowing stop and frisk experience. View that video, plus an Eyewitness 7 segment on the guy, below:
Tagged
Albany
nyclu
nypd
nypd database
senator eric adams
stop and frisk
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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