Number of People Stopped by New York Police Soars

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By: AL BAKER and EMILY VASQUEZ
NEW YORK,NY Published: February 3, 2007

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The New York Police Department released new information yesterday showing that police officers stopped 508,540 individuals on New York City streets last year --- an average of 1,393 stops per day --- often searching them for illegal weapons. The number was up from 97,296 in 2002, the last time the department divulged 12 months' worth of data.

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Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

The report on so-called stop-and-frisks by the police was released Friday.

After inquiries by the City Council and civil rights advocates, the department delivered four bound volumes of statistics to the Council in midafternoon. The raw data showed that more than half of those stopped last year were black: an average of 67,000 per quarter.

At the same time, the average number of people arrested per quarter as a result of such stops almost doubled to 5,317 last year, from 2,819 in 2002, and summonses nearly quintupled, to a quarterly average of 7,292 last year from 1,461 in 2002.

Until yesterday, the most recent information released by the Police Department about how and why it stops people to search them, sometimes looking for illegal guns, was from 2003, according to city officials and city and court records. Some officials have said that lag put the department at odds with a pair of legal requirements that sprang from public outrage at the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo , an unarmed black street peddler.

The department, which rejects such assertions, has not released numbers from 2004 and 2005, or from the last three months of 2003.

Those who review the data are now grappling with dual issues: determining why the Police Department waited so long to release any new figures, and why it is stopping more people and searching them.

The issue of these police-public encounters --- called "stop and frisks" --- became an emotional flashpoint after the shooting of Mr. Diallo, whose death in a barrage of 41 police bullets led to weeks of protests and scores of arrests outside 1 Police Plaza, in Lower Manhattan.

Many of the protesters contended that there was a pattern of racial profiling in stop-and-frisks. A state study later in 1999 confirmed racial disparities in such stops.

The guidelines to monitor stop-and-frisks in detail were set forth in a city law signed in 2001, and in a federal court case settled by the Bloomberg administration in 2004. Both called for the Police Department to release to the City Council, four times a year, basic data about the people who are stopped and questioned by officers, and the reasons for such encounters.

But until yesterday, it had been a year since the department reported its stop-and-frisk activity, and those numbers dated from a three-month period ending in September 2003.

In the meantime, the Civilian Complaint Review Board , an independent city agency that investigates charges of police misconduct, found that complaints involving stops and searches have more than doubled in recent years, increasing to 2,556 last year from 1,128 in 2003. Complaints involving police stops now account for 33 percent of all complaints, up from 20 percent in 2003.

At a City Council hearing on Jan. 24, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly assured council members that his officers were not practicing racial profiling in street stops.

"Officers are stopping those they reasonably suspect of committing a crime, based on descriptions and circumstances," Mr. Kelly said, "and not on personal bias."

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that the department's analysis of the numbers showed that while 55.2 percent of the stop encounters last year involved blacks, 68.5 percent of crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims (or by witnesses, in the case of homicides). Hispanics, he said, made up 30.5 percent of those stopped and 24.5 percent of suspected offenders. For whites, he said, the numbers were 11.1 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.

Mr. Browne said that aggressive street enforcement was partly responsible for the increase in stop-and-frisks. Also, he said, "careful accounting" of such encounters by the department in recent years made the increase seem greater. "Part of it is taking guns off the street and responding to complaints where we use stop-and-frisk," he said.

It was unclear last night how much of the increase in stops was due to suspected gun possession or how many led to gun arrests. Mr. Browne could not confirm a direct line between gun arrests and increases in stops, and said officers' efforts to take guns off the streets were just one facet of the crime suppression the stop-and-frisk forms reflected.

The 2006 figures, delivered yesterday by two officers in plain clothes, were contained in four books of about 250 pages each. Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., chairman of the Council's public safety committee, said his staff was unable to interpret the numbers immediately.

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