October 19, 2011 Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, Esq.

United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Dear Assistant Attorney General Perez: We write to you today to urge the U.S. Department of Justice to begin a formal investigation into the New York City Police Departments stop, question, and frisk policy. We applaud the Justice Department for charging Police Officer Michael Daragjati with falsely arresting a black man on Staten Island because of his race. But the problems with the NYPDs stop and frisk practice as currently constituted go far beyond just a few bad apples. What we have is a failure of the City to acknowledge that the NYPDs stop and frisk policy violates the constitutional rights of the people of New York, particularly the rights of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. This failure cannot be fixed by lawsuits against individual officers alone. Federal intervention is needed and it is needed now. In 2011, the NYPD is on pace to make more than 700,000 stops or about one person every 90 seconds, 365 days a year. And yet in 93% of all stops, police could find no reason to make an arrest. The most common reason cited by NYPD officers for making a stop is furtive movement by an individual on the street. The one-size-fits-all explanation as a justification for stops is unacceptable and unconstitutional and allows police to target black and Hispanic New Yorkers under the guise of having reasonable suspicion. Fully 85% of people stopped in New York are black or Hispanic. Those people are arrested at the same rate as whites, just under 7%. Earlier this year, the city of Philadelphia entered a federal consent decree eliminating furtive movement as a ground for street stops. New York should be no different. Concerns about the constitutionality of stops and the targeting of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers are nothing new. Indeed, problems with the NYPDs stop and frisk policy have been well known for years. In 1999, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer issued a report concluding that the street search tactics unfairly singled out the Citys Black and Hispanic residents.

Likewise, in 2000, in the aftermath of the shooting death of unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo at the hands of the NYPD, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York as well as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that the NYPD street stop program was fraught with racial profiling. In response, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani asserted, There is no racial profiling in the New York City Police Department. Over the last decade, as the number of street stop have increased more than 400%, we have heard those words repeated time and time again by NYPD officials. Just this month, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, testifying before the New York City Council, insisted, We dont racially profile. Given the Citys unwillingness to acknowledge structural problems with its stop and frisk program, it comes as no surprise that eleven years and millions of questionable stops later, this City is still waiting for meaningful changefor a street stop policy that is designed to identify true threats rather than the color of ones skin. Last month, Judge Shira Scheindlin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York found that serious questions remain about racial disparities in current stop and frisk practices; about the constitutionality of thousands of stops that do not result in arrest; and about the role quotas may play in driving the four-fold increase in stops over the last decade. A new investigation would help to answer these questions and chart a roadmap for reform, just as similar investigations into police practices have done recently in Newark, Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Given the extraordinary effect of current stop and frisk practice on the lives of millions of New Yorkers, the refusal of the City and the NYPD to acknowledge problems with the practice, and the ever-increasing rate of stops in the City, we believe it is both necessary and appropriate to begin a formal investigation under the DOJs pattern and practice authority pursuant to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. We look forward to working with you in this endeavor and thank you for your careful attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Stringer Manhattan Borough President

Eric Adams New York State Senator, 20th District