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NYPD says plan to monitor 14th Amendment stop-and-frisk violations is finally 'a priority'
By
Giulia Heyward
Published Dec 17, 2024
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By
Giulia Heyward
Published Dec 17, 2024
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An NYPD official Monday acknowledged that for years, police officials failed to come up with a plan to monitor whether cops were complying with the 14th Amendment during stop-and-frisk searches — despite ongoing demands from a federal monitor put in place to help curb the department’s racial profiling and other constitutional violations.
But Michael Gerber, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of legal matters, said during a heated oversight hearing by the City Council’s public safety committee that the plan is now “a priority.” He said the department had sent federal officials a draft plan for compliance with the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
“So developing this plan has been a legal mandate for over 10 years,” City Councilmember Yusef Salaam asked Gerber. “I have a very simple question, what's taking so long? And what are the details of that plan?”
Gerber called it a “fair critique.”
“There certainly was a period of time when we had not done that [created the compliance plan],” Gerber said. "That’s a fair criticism. But we really made a push this year, this calendar year, to fill that gap. So we’re doing it now. We’re working with the monitor on that and it is a priority.”
He said the department had made other meaningful reforms since in the 11 years since a federal court found the police department’s tactics violated both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, disproportionately targeting people of color. Gerber said there had been “a lot of focus on the Fourth Amendment piece,” which protects against unreasonable searches.
A federal monitor report released in September found that the NYPD still often failed to discipline officers for illegal stopping and searching people on the street, and that many officers still failed to document stops. Illegal stops declined for several years after the court ruling, but rose every year since Mayor Eric Adams took office, the report found. And it said there still wasn’t an 14th Amendment compliance plan in hand at the time, “raising a major hurdle in terms of compliance.”
“Few would have expected that it would take more than a decade for the NYPD to make the changes required to comply with the court’s orders,” the monitor wrote at the time, saying there were still too many illegal stops taking place and not enough being done to hold police accountable.
The monitor report credited the NYPD for stepping up training, revising policies and taking some steps too increase accountability among command officers, but wrote the department “must focus on proper supervision of officers so that stop-and-frisk practices are in accordance with the law.” And the monitor said it was still too early to tell whether command-level meetings started this year to review improper stops would have any impact.
Concern over the police department’s stop-and-frisk tactics led city lawmakers to enact the How Many Stops Act a year ago, despite attempts from Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, to stop its passage — with the council ultimately overriding his veto. The bill requires police to document low-level encounters with New Yorkers, which advocates say will increase transparency and help combat a history of racial profiling and abuse by the NYPD.
During the oversight hearing, elected officials and police officials argued over whether the NYPD’s actions were discriminatory to begin with.
At one point, Gerber began arguing with Queens Councilmember Tiffany Caban, calling her questions during the hearing “offensive.”
“You are suggesting that we are targeting people because of their race, and we are not,” Gerber said.
“Then why does the data say that disproportionately Black and brown people are being searched?” Caban replied.
NYPD officials also said that roughly 24,000 officers have completed implicit bias training, out of 33,00 uniformed officers in total. Gerber described the training as a “video module on racial profiling and biased based policing.”
The hearing took place after multiple criminal justice reform organizations gathered outside of City Hall to demonstrate support for a bill that would end the NYPD’s Criminal Group Database, otherwise known as the “gang” database. The groups described the database in a statement as “reminiscent of the NYPD’s racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices,” saying it labeled “thousands of Black and Latino New Yorkers as ‘members’ or ‘associates’ of gangs based on imprecise criteria.”
“New Yorkers deserve transparency for how police powers are implemented, and we demand accountability when those procedures are used unfairly,” Lori Zeno, executive director of Queens Defenders, said in the statement.
Giulia Heyward
Giulia Heyward is a breaking news reporter on the Day-Of desk. She previously worked at NPR, as a breaking news reporter, and the New York Times, as a reporting fellow on the national desk. Her work has also appeared in CNN, The Atlantic and Politico. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or more securely on signal at 917-715-1458.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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