New York City police have to track the race of people they stop. Will others follow suit?

NEW YORK – New York City this week mandated that police officers track the race of people they stop for questioning, a move that could help curtail racial disparities in policing and spawn similar changes for departments nationwide.

In a rare step, the City Council prevailed over the mayor’s objection, passing the How Many Stops Act, a measure that requires officers to report the details of low-level investigative encounters between police and the public. New Yorkers will soon have a clearer picture of what police do in their daily work, since existing data on racial profiling doesn't capture the disparities in police stops, according to the law’s backers.

“Black and Latino New Yorkers continue to be disproportionately subjected to unconstitutional stops that are underreported,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, the first Black person to lead the body, said Tuesday. “Civilian complaints of misconduct are at their highest levels in a decade. These stops can no longer happen in the shadows.” 

Many of the country’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies already collect data on certain kinds of stops, but policing experts told USA TODAY that these lower-level stops – when police stop and ask people who they are, where they live or where they’re headed – are not always tracked. The new law requires that officers document who they stopped, why they stopped them, as well as the outcome of the stop.

Experts and advocates said the new New York City data collection could expose and help diminish racial disparities. The change might also encourage other local governments around the country to follow suit.

“Data is really the only way that you can even start a conversation about reforms in so many situations,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project. “So making sure that there's a mechanism for that data to be available is just kind of a prerequisite for any meaningful reform.” 

What does the new law do?

Previously, New York City officers only had to log stops if they had probable cause to make an arrest or reasonable suspicion that a person had committed or would commit a crime, the same criteria that were used to justify the "stop and frisk” policy. That policy was shown to disproportionately target Black and Latino New Yorkers. In 2013, a federal judge ruled “stop and frisk” violated the constitutional rights of Black and Latino people.

The new law applies to investigative stops when officers ask a person about a known crime or a criminal activity they believe is taking place.

Advocates believe these stops inequitably target people of color, but until now, the disparity they're calling out has been anecdotal. Collecting data about these interactions will help the public understand the scope of the problem and could alter the way police work in the future.

Many departments already collect data about investigative stops, but these lower-level stops are “where you see tremendous disparity, tremendous bias interjected that a lot of times does not get accounted for,” said Chris Burbank, a law enforcement strategy consultant for the Center for Policing Equity.

“There's no documentation whatsoever,” he said. “So historically, these have been widely abused.”

The Vera Institute, which tracks how city and county police departments release data, has uncovered concerning omissions about the motorists and pedestrians stopped by police. Of the 94 jurisdictions in Vera’s index, 54 police departments collect no data about the people they stop. Departments that do collect information tend to have very little to show, reflecting the lack of transparency by police data nationally, said Daniela Gilbert, director of Vera’s Redefining Public Safety initiative.

In terms of its stops, New York scores below several California cities and New Orleans on the index in terms of transparency, though Gilbert said the city could ultimately alter police practices once it is more open about what it’s doing.

“The legislation improves police transparency, which is important for public safety because of trust-building, and also, it’ll help identify appropriate use of police resources,” she said.

The new law in New York requires officers to respond to general questions about a person’s age, gender, race and ethnicity, note some details about what led to the stop, and state whether the interaction resulted in a summons or the use of force. 

The law goes into effect immediately. Police are mandated to release the first data in the fall.

Philadelphia gathered data, some racial disparities declined

These types of investigative stops are problematic and not particularly fruitful in terms of crime-solving, said Delores Jones-Brown, a visiting professor at Howard University and a professor emerita at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Predictive stops – when officers try to discern which residents committed or are likely to commit a crime – overwhelmingly fail to accurately find criminal suspects, she said. The real impact of these stops is that they often hinder people, often Black and Latino youth, from going about their daily lives and getting to school or the store. Evidence suggests that witnessing these stops also makes it difficult for people to trust the police.

New York City’s new law, she said, “may be the beginning of forcing the department to be more creative and more imaginative (about) how it will engage with members of the community who need police protection most but don't want to be subjected to burdensome policing.”

David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, said collecting data also makes it possible for police to improve how they're treating the public.

"If the data shows patterns, correct them," Rudovsky said.

Bonds, the police accountability expert, said that data from Philadelphia indicates that when police departments are required to collect more information about stops, racial disparities decrease and police are less likely to stop members of the public.

The Philadelphia Police Department settled a lawsuit in 2011 accusing police officers of illegally stopping and frisking thousands of people. Police agreed in that settlement to an array of transparency mandates, including an agreement that data on police stops would be publicly available. In the decade since the settlement, racial disparities in police stops of pedestrians decreased dramatically, although disparities in vehicle stops became worse, a report from the city’s district attorney’s office last year found.

Bonds noted that Philadelphia police have also stopped making certain low-level stops altogether, but she said New York City’s new law could “absolutely” influence other cities to take similar action.

Traffic stops:Tyre Nichols' death and why minor traffic stop turn deadly for people of color

Tracking could hinder police work, critics say

Critics of the new law raised concerns about its impact on police work. Mayor Eric Adams, a former New York City Police Department sergeant, said in a statement that under the new law, “police officers are forced to fill out additional paperwork rather than focus on helping New Yorkers and strengthening community bonds.”

The new law does not include tracking casual conversations between police officers and members of the public. However, Jillian Snider, an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former NYPD officer, said officers may be less likely to engage in general conversation with people if they have to document other conversations, which could hurt the investigatory process. 

She highlighted another concern: the data collection could result in inaccuracies: poor data collection. In one example of this problem, the USA TODAY Network found that in 57 cities and towns, police marked the majority of men with Hispanic surnames as white on traffic tickets.  

Snider said accurate data collection is not a simple or straightforward undertaking.

“I assume most people are not going to be forthcoming with that information, so you're gonna have a lot of cops doing a lot of guessing on what people's demographics and ethnicity are,” she said. “Or on the complete opposite end, you might just have cops not talking to people, period, unless they have reasonable suspicion to do so.”

Snider, who is also a policy director for R Street Institute, said she is unaware of other departments in the country where police are required to collect data about these low-level stops. She thinks the vote on Tuesday could be a harbinger of change.

“In cities and localities that have council members that are of the ideological persuasion of those in the New York City Council, I do think that this could start a trend,” she said.

Questions can be answered quickly and easily, advocates say

Advocates of the new law say gathering demographic information should not be cumbersome.

The data collection will likely be done with a mobile device and will involve answering about five or six questions in a few seconds, said New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who introduced the law.

New York has the nation’s most technologically advanced police department, and now it will use data instead of anecdotes or guessing to determine if crime fighting has been uneven in some communities, he said.

"We seem sometimes to be in a country where facts don't even matter, but I think they're going to make a comeback," Williams told USA TODAY. "It's really important that we're all looking at the same data."

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