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Study on NYPD street stops and minorities due

BY ROCCO PARASCANDOLA | rocco.parascandola@newsday.com

November 9, 2007

The study commissioned by the New York Police Department to analyze how it stops people on the street will soon be released, sources told Newsday Thursday, and it is likely to raise new concerns among minorities about their dealings with police.

The study, by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think thank, was paid for by the Police Foundation, an organization that funds NYPD initiatives, and is based on the same raw data that the NYPD refused to turn over to the City Council and the New York Civil Liberties Union.

RAND been studying the NYPD's practices since March, focusing on the role race plays in everyday street stops, known as "stop and frisks."

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly ordered the study following the release in February of statistics that showed police stopped 508,540 people in 2006, a five-fold increase from 2002.

The statistics sparked criticism that blacks and Hispanics were being routinely targeted by police without cause. About 10 percent of those stopped were issued summonses or arrested.

The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. It has said that aggressive policing and more careful accounting by officers helped drive up the number of stops.

The department has also said it does not engage in racial profiling and that 68 percent of crimes last year involved suspects described as black and 24 percent involved suspects described as Hispanic.

But only 18 percent of last year's Stop, Question and Frisk forms, as they are formally known, involved people stopped because they "fit a relevant description." The others were stopped for other reasons.

RAND, based in California and widely respected, has studied the same issue in other cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Cincinnati.

Greg Ridgeway, associate director of RAND's Safety and Justice Program, who led the NYPD study, said in March that officers would be interviewed about their decisions to stop people.

He also said that RAND researchers would ride with police officers in patrol cars.

A RAND spokesman yesterday said neither RAND nor Ridgeway would comment. But Ridgeway has previously said that racial profiling doesn't work.

In a Washington Post commentary he co-authored last year, Ridgeway discussed the drawbacks of religious profiling when it comes to tracking terrorists.

He noted the failure of racial profiling in the 1980s, when federal drug agents working the Interstate 95 corridor focused on young black males.

Drug dealers, the commentary said, turned to couriers who did not fit the profile -- such as elderly couples in RVs -- "and a generation of African-Americans was alienated."

Christopher Dunn, associate legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that despite RAND's reputation, the only way to assure the public that police are stopping people for justifiable reasons is to have an independent study.

"By keeping the study under its sole control and by refusing to release its stop-and-frisk database to anyone other than RAND, the police department has created a situation where many will be suspicious of the RAND report almost no matter what it says."