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Judge: Should NYPD Cops Wear Cameras?
By
Christopher Robbins
Published May 21, 2013
Modified May 21, 2013
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published May 21, 2013
Modified May 21, 2013
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Attorneys made their final summations in the landmark federal stop-and-frisk trial yesterday, and in addition to voicing skepticism of the practice's effectiveness, the judge expressed interest in the NYPD adopting body-mounted cameras to monitor officers' encounters with citizens. "It struck me…that if the officer knew it was being recorded on video it would solve a lot of problems. Everybody would know exactly what occurred," Judge Shira Scheindlin said. "It would be easy to review it. The officer would be aware he's on tape. Everybody would know."
Recently the Salt Lake City police department began using the cameras, which cost $1,000 apiece (there are roughly 35,000 uniformed officers in the NYPD). "What better way to document the entire event then an officer wear a camera that sees what the officer sees?" Salt Lake City police chief Chris Burbank said.
The cameras were not among the five remedies listed by the plaintiffs' attorney, but Judge Scheindlin said that the cameras, which a police witness for the City mentioned in his testimony, was the one that particularly "intrigued" her.
The judge also marveled at the NYPD's low success rate in finding weapons or making arrests using stop-and-frisk. "A lot of people are being frisked or searched on suspicion of having a gun and nobody has a gun," Judge Scheindlin said. "You reasonably suspect something and you're wrong 90 percent of the time, what can I infer from that? That is a lot of misjudgment of suspicion," she added. "That's a big error." Indeed, 88% of the five million people stopped each year during the Bloomberg administration are released and presumed innocent.
Judge Scheindlin's decision in expected to be handed down in the next few months. As our previous reporting on the trial has shown, the question she has to answer is complex and not easy to prove: is the NYPD stopping people based on reasonable suspicion, or the color of a person's skin?
In one revealing exchange in the transcript, City attorney Heidi Grossman invokes the argument frequently made by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg: data says that blacks and Latinos commit and suffer from violent crime at higher rates than whites, so they're actually being under-stopped. It's regression analysis!
THE COURT: I know. But what you're drawing from the regression analysis is if they match well that proves there's no race bias. I'm saying it may be precisely the opposite. The closer the match may prove that the officer is saying that since Blacks commit crimes, I should stop Blacks to the same percentage as crime suspect. It's a worrisome argument.
Stops decreased significantly in 2012, while crime has also decreased.
Meanwhile, Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio released a report today showing that the NYPD found a weapon in one out of every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. Those numbers were one in 71 and one in 93 for Latinos and blacks, respectively.
Tagged
center for constitutional rights
nyclu
nypd
Ray Kelly
stop-and-frisk trial
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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