‘Useless’ exercise in racial guesswork
The controversial cop bill at the center of Mayor Adams’ upcoming veto battle with the City Council could lengthen officers’ already long days — and likely end up yielding “useless” data — according to police sources and experts.
Much of the uproar surrounding the How Many Stops Act stems from its requirement that cops must guess at the “apparent” race, ethnicity, gender and age of the person to whom they are speaking, then record it, during even the most mundane conversations.
This foundational flaw in data collection means that whatever statistics the police accumulate as a result of the bill will be “pretty useless,” according to Christopher Hermann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan and a former NYPD crime analyst.
“It’s horrible data,” Hermann told The Post on Sunday. “[The cops] know that whatever they’re going to put down is very subjective, and they’re not able to confirm it.
“It’s the garbage-in, garbage-out concept,” he continued. “I’m just going to give you crap that looks nice — but it’s still crap. You’re building this house on a foundation of sand.”
Longer waits for cops
Right now, cops only have to check off an acknowledgment of a so-called Level 1 encounter, the most common investigative interaction, in which an officer asks someone general, non-accusatory questions.
The NYPD already captures the majority of the information for more serious inquiries — known as Level 2 or Level 3 stops — with its body-worn-camera reports.
Under the bill — which Adams vetoed Friday, setting up a potential override vote by the council — cops will have to check boxes recording the demographic information for each Level 1 stop, something critics argue will take cops off the street for too long and add to the NYPD’s overtime costs, which came in at $2.22 billion in the 2022 fiscal year.
The low-level talks happen when a cop is, say, questioning a potential witness. Each cop has, on average, roughly two dozen Level 1 calls each shift, which could require documentation for 50 to 60 interactions with different people, according to police sources.
The sources said the new requirements could tack on about a half-hour to every tour.
“I handle over two dozen 911 calls per shift,” one Brooklyn cop told The Post. “A lot of those calls are already several hours old by the time I get them, and that means the citizens of New York have already waited hours to report crimes like a burglary or stolen car for me to take a report. Now they will wait even longer.”
For instance, the officer said, they’d have to do an individual report for every person sitting in a car during a traffic stop.
“Cops will definitely talk to less people, and, in some cases, even avoid people,” the officer continued. “The bottom line is cops will be less efficient and the community will suffer.”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a co-sponsor of the legislation, has said collecting the data would prevent the kind of biased policing the NYPD has seen in the past and build trust in overpoliced neighborhoods.
‘Flawed’ policy
“Effectively producing public safety based on results, not hysteria, means getting critical information about whether and how policing reforms are being implemented on the ground in our communities,” Williams said in a statement ahead of the bill’s passage in December.
“New Yorkers have a right to know this information, and elected officials have an obligation to create policies based on it to ensure community safety and prevent injustices,” he said.
Hermann, the professor, said he wonders what the city will do with the flawed information.
“Is this eventually going to dictate department policy? Because that would be really stupid,” he said. “Is it going to dictate public policy? Because that would be even more stupid.
“Is it going to help the officers, or be used for training purposes and to make officers better cops? Probably not. So to me, why are we doing it? What’s the benefit of this?”