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Judge orders NYPD to give group database on street stops

The Associated Press

5:26 PM EDT, May 30, 2008

The New York Police Department must release an internal, electronic database of hundreds of thousands of street stops of pedestrians to civil rights advocates who want to analyze it for evidence of racial bias, a Manhattan judge has ruled.

Justice Marilyn Diamond, in a decision on a New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, wrote that the law "is well settled that government records, including police records, are presumptively open for public inspection." She found that the nation's largest police department had failed to show the database should be exempt because the information is too sensitive, and she ruled it should be turned over to the NYCLU within 60 days.

Police officials have long denied allegations of racial profiling.

"We are disappointed in the judge's view of the law enforcement privileges asserted regarding this sensitive database," a city lawyer, Jesse Levine, said Friday in a statement. "We are reviewing the decision to determine our next legal steps."

The NYPD had argued that releasing the records -- which give locations and other details of each stop since 2006 -- would pose a risk to police officers because they contain their names and other personal information.

The Manhattan judge, in the decision filed Thursday, said the department could remedy that problem by blacking out the information. She also noted that the department had previously given the database to the RAND Corp. and a research institute at the University of Michigan for studies.

"The NYPD has not offered any reason why the petitioner should be denied access to the same database which it has already shared with other outside organizations," Diamond wrote.

NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman said Friday that the information would "give New Yorkers a better understanding of the extent to which the NYPD targets communities of color and particularly African American males for aggressive stops, even though they're doing nothing wrong."

The stop-and-frisk tactics came under scrutiny after the NYPD disclosed last year that it made more than 500,000 stops in 2006 alone. Slightly more than 50 percent of the people stopped were black, while about a fourth of the city's residents are black.

Earlier this year, police reported it had stopped about 145,000 people for searches during the first quarter of this year -- the most of any quarter since the numbers were first made public in 2002.

The RAND Corp., in a study commissioned by the NYPD and released last year, concluded the raw data "distorts the magnitude and, at times, the existence of racially biased policing."

The study acknowledged that "black pedestrians were stopped at a rate that is 50 percent greater than their representation in the residential census." But it claimed using the census as a benchmark was unreliable because it failed to factor in variables such as a higher arrest rate and more crime-suspect descriptions involving minorities.