Police officers pulled vehicles over nearly 675,000 times in 2022 — on par with the number of street stops during the height of the stop-and-frisk controversy that raged more than a decade ago, according to NYPD statistics.
The newly released data, the first-ever year-end accounting of NYPD vehicle stops, indicate the race of drivers stopped and if they were searched, summonsed or arrested. The data show Black drivers were pulled over the most.
The NYPD made 673,120 vehicle stops last year, including 61,025 at vehicle checkpoints, the stats reveal. Of the total stops, 77% of them, or about 518,000, involved a summons issued to the driver. Arrests were made in a little more than 2% of the stops, about 15,000. Searches were conducted in about 13,000 of the stops.
The data, mandated by the passage in 2021 of a city law designed to prevent racial profiling, deserves a closer look, said Christopher Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“This initial disclosure of the number of vehicle stops reminds me of 2007, when we forced the NYPD to release pedestrian stop numbers and which revealed over 500,000 stops in 2006,” Dunn said.
“That got the ball rolling on the public controversy over pedestrian stops and we believe this new disclosure should prompt close scrutiny of car stops. The sheer number of stops is alarming given that racial profiling has been shown to be prevalent in traffic stops and given the potential for car stops to turn confrontational, even violent.”
“Between drivers and passengers, nearly 1 million people likely were caught up in NYPD traffic stops last year,” he added. “Any police operation of that size needs to be closely regulated and fully transparent to the public.”
It was not clear how many stops were performed by officers in the Neighborhood Safety Unit, the gun-focused team that replaced the controversial Anti-Crime Unit involved in a disproportionate number of shootings and the subject of numerous misconduct allegations.
The NYPD said in a statement said it was still too early to fully assess the vehicle stop numbers.
“But make no mistake,” the department said, “whether for street encounters or vehicle stops, both are fundamental tools in a thoughtful and multilayered public safety approached practiced by the NYPD to keep all New Yorkers safe and free from fear.”
The data do not indicate how many stops involved action that may have been taken against a passenger.
U.S. Census data suggest white people comprise about 34% of vehicle commuters in the city, the NYCLU said, followed by Latinos at 25%, Blacks at 24%, and Asians and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) at 16%.
But for the 620,987 stops where the person’s race was recorded, Black drivers were pulled over the most — 197,000 times or 32% of all stops.
Next came Latinos, stopped 173,000 times, comprising 28% of stops, followed by white drivers, stopped 160,000 times, making up 26% of stops, and Asian drivers, stopped 79,000 times, or 13% of stops.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who as a City Councilman in charge of the Public Safety Committee pushed for the NYPD to document every vehicle stop, said the 2022 numbers are startling and took him back to his 20s, when he was pulled over in Springfield Gardens the day he got his first car and left his home to get milk. He was summonsed for no insurance, even though he had proof of insurance, he said, and the ticket was later dismissed.
“I believe I was profiled because there was no reason for the stop,” Richards told the Daily News.
“We all know that driving while Black is a real thing. We’ve always known. That fear for Black men driving vehicles is real and even as borough president if I’m in my personal car and a cop is in my rear view I always look back. It doesn’t matter what your position is.”
Steafa Bryant, 30, knows that feeling.
Bryant, who is Black, said he was stopped in his car in the Bronx in 2020 for reasons never made clear to him.
“When they pulled me over they had their hand on their gun,” he said in an interview near the 44th Precinct station. “I came out the car and I was on the hood, with my hands up. I got pat down. There were four cops. I was scared.”
He put on an act, he admitted, fake crying and telling police he wanted to go home to his kids.
“I was being so apologetic,” he remembered. “I didn’t want to give them no reason to have a problem.”
Bryant wasn’t arrested or summonsed — just given an order, he says: “Take your a— home.”
“That’s why I don’t drive no more,” he said.
Another Bronx resident, Michael Perez, 32 and Latino, said he’s been driving 13 years without ever being stopped though he was stopped and frisked multiple times on the street when he was in his early 20s.
“That’s life,” he said.
In Brownsville, Brooklyn, where some of the highest numbers of stop-and-frisk encounters were documented at the height of the controversy, a Black former resident back on a visit said he believes police are more likely to stop people without justification when crime is up.
“When (the police) are on high alert then you know they’re gonna, by any means necessary,” said Jason, 39, who owns a demolition company in Georgia and asked his last name not be printed. “They’re gonna use whatever force that they need.”
Kizzy Roseboro, a Black 44-year-old Department of Education secretary, said the increase in crime has everyone on edge — and contributes to police sometimes going over the line, she believes.
Roseboro said she tells her son to comply if stopped.
“Don’t give them no negative,” she tells him. “(Cops) feel intimidated so they need to prove themselves.”
A spokeswoman for City Councilwoman Kamillah Hanks, a Democrat who is chair of the Public Safety Committee, did not respond to requests for comment or to say whether Hanks would call for a hearing on the vehicle-stop data.
In addition to the car-stop data, the NYPD released its street-stop statistics. Police made 14,782 such stops last year.
That’s a far cry from the record high of more than 686,000 stops in 2011, two years before a federal judge ruled the NYPD practiced stop-and-frisk in a way that violated the constitutional rights of minorities.
But last year’s tally is the highest since the 22,939 stops in 2015. As in past years, Blacks and Latinos were stopped the most, close to 90% of the total. About 35% of those stopped were either arrested or summonsed, a rate that has increased from 10% in 2006.
The NYPD said the enforcement increase, compared with the years when hundreds of thousands of stops were made, “is the definition of fair and effective policing.”
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