NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- The number of people stopped and searched by police on city streets fell by more than 12 percent during the second quarter of this year, compared to the same period last year, police said. The numbers mark the New York Police Department's latest report on a law enforcement technique that has drawn scrutiny from civil rights advocates.
Officers conducted 113,945 "stop-and-frisks'' from April through June, about 15,000 fewer than in the same months in 2006, the NYPD said Friday.
Police say the stops are intended to snare potential suspects, and Assistant Chief Michael Collins said a rising number of arrests resulted from such stops in the second quarter of this year: 6 percent, up from 4 percent in the same period the year before. Summonses increased from 6 percent to 8 percent, he said.
The NYPD has faced questions of racial profiling in stop-and-frisks, as a majority of people stopped in recent years have been black. That remained true in the second quarter of 2007, when 53 percent of those stopped were black, 32 percent Hispanic and 12 percent white.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 25 percent of the city's population is black, 28 percent is Hispanic and 44 percent is white. But police say the suspects described to them, and therefore the people officers stop _ don't mirror the population's demographics. In the second quarter, 67 percent of suspects were described as black by victims and witnesses, Collins said.
The NYPD announced earlier this year that it had hired the Rand Corp. research group to examine the department's history of stop-and-frisks for evidence of racial bias. The move amid concerns over statistics showing officers searched more than half a million pedestrians last year, a fivefold increase since 2002.
The department said more vigorous enforcement was partly responsible for the rise, but better record-keeping may have played a bigger role.
The New York Civil Liberties Union asked the department last month to turn over records documenting hundreds of thousands of stop-and-frisks over the past few years.
The police department's stop-and-search policies were under a microscope earlier, after the 1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man. Afterward, reviews indicated there were racial disparities in the stops at the time.
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