N.Y.P.D. Anti-Crime Units Returning to Illegal Tactics, Report Shows

The New York Police Department’s anti-crime units are still stopping, frisking and searching too many people unlawfully — almost all of them people of color — despite assurances from Mayor Eric Adams that new policies and training would reform the practice, according to a new report by a court-appointed monitor.

The monitor, Mylan L. Denerstein, filed a report in federal court in Manhattan on Monday detailing what she described as unlawful policing. Ms. Denerstein, whose position was created in 2013 after a court ruled the Police Department’s use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional, is assigned to oversee the units, which have a history of targeting Black and Hispanic people.

Earlier versions of the units were responsible for a disproportionate number of police shootings, and they were disbanded in 2020. Mr. Adams reinstated and renamed them after he took office last year, but critics were skeptical that they could be run without racially profiling young men of color, as previous units had.

The report found that almost all of the stops made by the rebranded “neighborhood safety teams” that it analyzed — 97 percent — were of Black or Hispanic people, and that 24 percent of the stops were unconstitutional. Of 230 car stops included in the sample, only two appear to have turned up weapons, the report said.

The study found especially troubling numbers in a handful of precincts, including the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, where only 41 percent of the stops, 32 percent of frisks and 26 percent of searches were constitutional, according to the report.

The Police Department and Mr. Adams did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Many New Yorkers opposed reviving the anti-crime units, whose officers often patrol in unmarked cars looking for people who they believe are behaving suspiciously, rather than responding in a routine manner to 911 calls.

Opponents warned that reviving the units would result in more improper stops and discriminatory policing, but Mr. Adams promised they would be run more responsibly and that misconduct and overly aggressive tactics would not be tolerated.

“I know how to do it right, because I fought against what was being done wrong,” he said at the time.

Monday’s report said its findings, which analyzed the first seven months of the revived units’ patrol, April though October 2022, warranted a more comprehensive audit. It called for the department to submit a plan within a month on how to improve its practices to conduct stops properly without violating constitutional rights.

Ms. Denerstein, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, produced the report with a team that included four former members of the Police Department. They analyzed stop reports filled out by officers, footage from body cameras, information about the corresponding 911 call and other information available to the police.

In the case of some unlawful stops, she said, “You have former officers looking at video and stating that the stops are not being done correctly.”

The units rolled out under Mr. Adams appeared to have a higher rate of unlawful stops than in an extensive sample of stops by all officers citywide in 2020, the monitor’s last review, the report said.

The earlier anti-crime units grew out of the department’s Street Crime Unit, which developed a swaggering reputation in the 1980s with its bold “We Own the Night” motto and predilection for hunting down armed criminals.

The Street Crime Unit sparked a public outcry after its members killed Amadou Diallo, who was Black and unarmed, in 1999, shooting at him 41 times. The group was disbanded in 2002.

It was replaced by the anti-crime units, which police officials have called one of their most effective tools in the battle against illegal guns. They have hailed the units as crucial to reducing murders and major crimes, and making Black and Hispanic neighborhoods safer by removing thousands of weapons from the streets.

But critics have disputed their effectiveness and derided them for playing an outsize role in the searches of millions of young Black and Latino men during the height of the stop-and-frisk era. A decade ago, a federal judge ruled that the department’s stop-and-frisk tactics were a form of racial profiling that violated constitutional rights.

In 2020, with crime at historic lows, and amid the social justice protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, disbanded the units.

But by the following year, gun violence was rising, and Mr. Adams, then a mayoral candidate, promised more aggressive policing. Critics called it a departure from his days as a captain in the Police Department, when he became a prominent voice against stop-and-frisk tactics.

As mayor, he said that he and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell would recruit at least 400 officers who would be vetted, trained and closely supervised to avoid discriminatory arrests and brutal tactics.

Officers would continue to patrol in unmarked vehicles, Mr. Adams said, but no longer in plainclothes, which made it hard to identify them and often caused problems. They would wear a modified uniform bearing a police insignia, in order to increase accountability.

Ms. Denerstein’s report described a lack of oversight by department officials, cited supervisors for failing to address improper stops, frisks and searches, and ordered the department to “take corrective action immediately.”

The report did praise some commands for conducting stops impeccably and called them models for lower-performing precincts in combining lawful and effective policing.

Ms. Denerstein said the compliant precincts showed that “lawful policing is effective.”

“In some commands, you have a high level of compliance, which makes it clear that lawful and effective policing are compatible,” Ms. Denerstein said. She said the report provided police officials a chance to improve matters.

“This is an opportunity for them to course-correct,” she said. “They can do better. Every New Yorker expects it and I hope they take this as an opportunity to do better.”