(NEW YORK) MintPress — The New York Police Department (NYPD) is no stranger to controversy, but as the city’s 2013 mayoral race gets underway, the force is facing a growing chorus of criticism for some of its heavy handed tactics.
Public advocate Bill de Blasio, the city’s second highest elected official and a likely candidate for mayor, said over the weekend that the NYPD was administering a “fatal dose” of stop-and-frisks, and on Wednesday he outlined a plan his office says will “dramatically reduce” the practice.
“We can’t have the social fabric continuing to be torn,” said de Blasio, noting that the high number of stops, especially among young African Americans and Hispanics, has made many residents distrustful of the officers who patrol their neighborhoods. “It’s breaking down something very fundamental here,” he added.
Indeed, NYPD officers stopped people 684,330 times in 2011, the highest number since the department started collecting the data in 2002, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). That is a 14 percent increase from 2010 and an increase of some 600 percent from 2002, the first year of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.
The vast majority of those stopped, 87 percent, were black or Latino, while roughly nine percent were white. Just 12 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and a mere one percent to the recovery of a weapon.
De Blasio, a former political aide to Hillary Clinton, is calling on Bloomberg to request an internal NYPD audit of its statistics on what happens after each stop-and-frisk incident, such as whether an arrest was made. He also wants the numbers to be released to the public on a weekly basis, rather than every three months, as they are currently reported to the City Council.
“It’s time for him to assert his authority and change directions,” said de Blasio of the mayor, adding that he “has ducked ownership” of the topic and “deferred to the police commissioner.”
Kelly on the defensive
The Police Department, led by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, has defended stop-and-frisks as necessary for keeping crime down. “New York continues to be the safest big city in America, and one of the safest of any size, significantly less crime per capita than even small cities,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne on Tuesday.
Appearing before the City Council in March, Kelly maintained that stop-and-frisk was meant to protect the same group of people that it is seen as targeting. “People of color,” he asserted were 96 percent of shooting victims in the city.
“How do we stop this violence?” he asked, saying that violence among minority youth is “something that the government has an obligation to try to solve.”
That is a sharp departure from Kelly’s comments in 2000, when the NYPD used stop-and-frisk tactics under then-mayor Rudy Giuliani. “A large reservoir of goodwill was under construction” before Giuliani, he told the City Bar Association. “It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.”
Kelly returned as police commissioner in 2002.
NYPD blues
At the same time, a wide-ranging lawsuit filed last month in in United States District Court in Manhattan charges that the City of New York, the Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) and several large corporations have regularly violated the constitutional rights of Occupy Wall Street protesters who have sought to express their opinions at various demonstrations across the city.
The lawsuit, which included several City Council members as plaintiffs, said that the city “in concert with various private and public entities” subjected the plaintiffs to “violations of rights to free speech, assembly, freedom of the press, false arrest, excessive force, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.”
At times, the Police Department had improperly photographed people who were arrested and may not have destroyed those pictures, when required by law, according to the lawsuit. In addition, the lawsuit said, the NYPD had stopped some plaintiffs from “carrying out their duties as elected officials.’’
The suit calls for, among other measures, the creation of an independent federal position to oversee the NYPD.
Patrolling the cops
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, while praising Commissioner Kelly, has also called for major changes in the stop-and-frisk policy as well as more Council oversight and police training.
“It is not a practice that I think the Police Department should stop; it’s a tool I think they should keep in their toolbox, but it’s one that I do think needs significant reform,” said Quinn, who is also likely to enter the race for mayor.
In February, she sent Kelly a letter addressing her concerns about the practice.