No NYPD in our halls
Hello again, and goodbye city life, says Guggenheim Stop-and-frisk reform replaces cops with tech in building safety
The NYPD has quietly shut down its Trespass Affidavit Program, ending a controversial initiative that was designed to keep troublemakers out of privately owned apartment buildings but instead turned into a stop and frisk flashpoint.
The NYPD, in ending TAP —which was also known as Clean Halls and dates back at least 30 years —said it was now using “smarter, more effective ways,” such as surveillance cameras, to help landlords keep their buildings free of drug dealers and loiterers.
“With our technological advances, our Neighborhood Policing and our precision crime-fighting strategies,” the department said in a statement, “we are moving forward together with all residents of these buildings to ensure even higher levels of public safety and security.”
The move comes three years after the NYPD settled a 2012 class-action lawsuit and agreed to a host of reforms.
The NYPD decision to end TAP does not affect NYCHA buildings, where police routinely conduct vertical patrols.
TAP’s dissolution took effect Wednesday, with precinct crime-prevention officers told to break the news to landlords who had given officers permission to enter their buildings. Landlords must remove any signs identifying buildings as a TAP location.
The move was eyed cautiously by two groups who represented plaintiffs in the class-action suit, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Bronx Defenders, a public defense group.
Christopher Dunn, legal director for the NYCLU, which was the lead counsel, said TAP “served as a license for NYPD officers to illegally stop, question and abuse building residents and their visitors.”
“While announcing an end to the program is a first step,” he said, “it will take years of officer retraining and court monitoring before we can be assured these abuses are over.”
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, who heads a civil rights unit at Bronx Defenders, said she won’t celebrate “unless and until Bronx residents living in private buildings are free from police harassment.”
“The NYPD has a history of dismantling a program only to redeploy the same practice in new packaging,” she said. “It will be important to see what steps the NYPD is taking to unwind the program and whether police conduct around those buildings actually changes.”
The lawsuit focused on trespassing enforcement citywide at some 8,000 buildings consisting mostly of Black and Hispanic residents.
In 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a ruling that focused on the Bronx, said officers were routinely stopping people outside their buildings and had “systemically crossed” the line between the legal and the unconstitutional.
Scheindlin later ruled against police in two related lawsuits, for stops made in public housing and on the streets, and appointed a federal monitor who has since put in place a number of court-ordered reforms.