CM Nurse on unconstitutional stops and officer discipline

Last month, the federal monitor overseeing the police department in the Floyd stop and frisk litigation found that 13 years since the federal court

found the NYPD stop and frisk program to be unconstitutional, the department is still routinely engaging in unconstitutional stops, frisks, and other acts.

The department's position, this is a question, is that unconstitutional policing or illegal policing is a crime, correct?

I'm not sure I have a question.

My question is, do you believe that unconstitutional policing is a crime?

If to the extent a stop violates the Fourth Amendment, that is a constitutional violation.

Is that a crime?

No.

It's a constitutional violation, which is significant.

But is that a crime?

No.

Okay.

So what would you call it then?

A constitutional violation.

Okay, fine.

So what, what, how many

Officers have been fired or disciplined for engaging in illegal policing or unconstitutional stops.

Let's just say in the last few years.

Sure.

So we can, I mean, I don't have the data here, but we can certainly get you data on discipline issued in connection with bad stops, frisk, or searches.

I do want to emphasize something.

Well, so can you do off the top of your head just this year?

Have there been any disciplinary actions?

Has anybody been fired for an unconstitutional stop?

Fired for an unconstitutional stop?

No.

Have officers received discipline?

Absolutely.

The answer to that question is yes.

Okay.

Sheriff, if I may just have a moment to just fully respond to the question, please.

Absolutely.

What the monitors report say is that actually the vast majority of officers in the department are doing this constitutionally the right way.

If you look at the data in those reports, in terms of certainly in the patrol response, 911 responses, complainant victim responses, the compliance rates are incredibly high.

What are the compliance rates?

In many cases, you're north of 90%.

Great.

And they're very, very high.

So we still have a little bit more to go.

So I guess what I'm saying is, like, what are the concrete actions that you all are doing to address that remaining group of folks that are not being compliant?

Yeah, and again, I'm talking about the patrol officers, not the specialty teams.

But we are working every day with the monitor on this.

And for example, like what we're doing in compliance that we're doing with compliance reviews, the work that we're doing, I literally like every day we are working on this issue.

And working very closely with the monitors team because while we've made a tremendous amount of progress and as you know as you know the number of stops that the department conducts has fallen over 90 percent

uh since since let's say 20 you know 2011 2012 right over 90 percent

the nature of policing in the city has changed dramatically fair enough but i guess my point still stands you know what exactly are you doing

what are the how many you know in the follow-up if you could provide i understand you're not prepared to talk about that today fine in the follow-up if you could provide you know what are the concrete actions you're taking for that remaining

percentage to get us to 100%, which should be the goal.

What are the disciplinary actions that have been taken?

It sounds like no one's been fired, even though this has been something for 13 years.

So we'd love to just get more of a breakdown.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Nurse.

And by the way, we're going to do a second round, so if there's any data that you don't have right now, feel free to ask about it on the second round.

Hopefully, you're able to look at your documents and get the information.

Next, we'll hear from Councilmember Hanks and then Caban.