Stop and Frisk in NYC: Floyd Ruling, Federal Oversight, and Reform

Stop-and-frisk in NYC is a policing tactic that lets an NYPD officer briefly detain a person and pat down their outer clothing when the officer has reasonable suspicion the person is involved in a crime or is carrying a weapon. It became the signature public safety strategy of the Bloomberg years, peaked at nearly 686,000 recorded stops in 2011, and was ruled unconstitutional in its application in 2013 after a federal judge found the NYPD had been targeting Black and Latino New Yorkers without the legal basis the Constitution requires. The tactic itself remains legal. How the NYPD uses it is still being litigated, monitored, and fought over more than a decade later.

What the Law Actually Allows

The constitutional authority for stop-and-frisk comes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Terry v. Ohio, which held that an officer may briefly stop a person and pat down their outer clothing when the officer has “reasonable suspicion” that the person is engaged in criminal activity or is armed and dangerous.¹ Reasonable suspicion is a lower bar than the probable cause needed for an arrest or a search warrant, but it still has to rest on specific, articulable facts, not a hunch and not a generalization about who tends to commit crime.²

That distinction, between suspicion tied to particular facts and suspicion tied to nothing in particular, is what the fight over stop-and-frisk in New York has ultimately been about.

How the NYPD Used It at Its Peak

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, recorded stops rose from roughly 97,000 in 2002 to more than 500,000 by 2006, reaching 685,724 in 2011.³⁴ The administration defended the volume as necessary to get guns off the street.

The people being stopped told a different story than the one City Hall told. Between 2003 and 2024, 90% of everyone stopped by the NYPD was a person of color. Black New Yorkers, about 23% of the city’s population, accounted for 52% of stops. White New Yorkers, 33% of the population, accounted for 10%.⁵ Black people were stopped at roughly eight times the rate of white people.

The encounters produced very little. Between 2003 and 2013, about 90% of stops ended without an arrest or a summons.³ Analysis of stops from 2005 through mid-2008 found weapons or contraband in just 2.6% of them, and white people who were stopped were slightly more likely than Black or Latino people to be found with contraband.⁶

In interviews collected by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2012, residents of the most heavily policed neighborhoods described the experience as a “military-style occupation” and reported changing clothing, hairstyles, or walking routes to try to avoid being stopped. The report also catalogued accounts of illegal profiling, physical brutality, inappropriate touching, and verbal abuse, including racial slurs, and noted that people who objected to their treatment sometimes ended up charged with resisting arrest.⁷ A 2013 Vera Institute survey found that only 40% of young people in those communities said they would feel comfortable seeking police help if they were in trouble.⁸

What Floyd v. City of New York Decided

On August 12, 2013, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled in Floyd v. City of New York that the city had violated the Fourth Amendment by acting with “deliberate indifference” toward officers making stops without reasonable suspicion, and had violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee by adopting “a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted communities on the basis of race.⁹¹⁰

The ruling did not ban stop-and-frisk. It ordered the NYPD to overhaul how it trains, supervises, and disciplines officers, appointed a federal monitor to oversee the changes, and mandated a body-worn camera pilot and a community engagement process to shape further reforms.⁹¹¹¹²

What Has Changed Since, and What Hasn’t

The Bloomberg administration appealed. When Bill de Blasio took office in January 2014 after campaigning on reform, he dropped the appeal and announced a settlement he called a “sweeping repudiation” of the previous approach, pledging to end “the overuse of stop-and-frisk that has unfairly targeted young African-American and Latino men.”¹³

Recorded stops collapsed. From nearly 686,000 in 2011, the number fell to about 45,800 in 2014, then to roughly 11,000 by 2017, and stood at 8,947 in 2021.³¹⁴

Mayor Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain who campaigned on bringing back plainclothes anti-crime units, reversed the trend after taking office in 2022. The NYPD recorded about 15,100 stops in 2022, roughly 17,000 in 2023, and 25,386 in 2024, a 50% jump from the previous year and the highest count since 2014. Racial composition has barely moved: in 2024, 60% of those stopped were Black and 31% were Latino.³

Adams has described the current approach as “precision policing,” saying his strategy achieves results “without harassing the communities that are involved.”¹⁵

Why the NYPD Is Still Under Federal Oversight

More than twelve years after Floyd, the monitorship is still active. Peter Zimroth served as the first federal monitor from 2013 until his death in November 2021.¹⁶¹² U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres appointed Mylan Denerstein in January 2022.¹⁷ In a February 2026 report, Denerstein concluded the NYPD has not reached “substantial compliance” with the 2013 order, called her findings a “wake-up call,” and noted that oversight was never intended to be permanent.¹⁸

Three problems keep coming up.

Self-Initiated Stops

Stops officers make on their own, rather than in response to a 911 call or a witness report, went from about 23% of all stops in 2021 to 51% in 2024.¹⁴ The monitor found these encounters were lawful 79% of the time; frisks during them were lawful 64% of the time; searches, 53%.¹⁸ In the first half of 2025, NYPD supervisors reviewed stops and called 99% of them lawful; the monitor’s own audits found 11% of the same stops were unconstitutional.¹⁹

Underreporting

In 2025, the monitor found that about 71% of stops were properly documented, meaning roughly 30% were not recorded despite legal requirements. In 2024, officers failed to report four in ten stops.¹⁴¹⁹

Neighborhood Safety Teams

The Adams administration reintroduced plainclothes anti-crime units under the names “Neighborhood Safety Teams” (NST) and “Public Safety Teams” (PST). They drive unmarked cars, wear distinct uniforms, and focus on proactive enforcement in high-crime areas. The monitor’s 2023 audit found NST officers had reasonable suspicion for 75% of their stops, versus 92% for regular patrol; PST officers were at 64%. NST frisks were lawful 58% of the time, NST searches 54%.²⁰ A separate CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance study, in which retired state judges reviewed 2022 body-worn camera footage, found that stops involving an NST officer were unconstitutional 35% of the time, compared with 16% for other stops.²¹ Civil rights attorneys for the Floyd plaintiffs have called for the units to be disbanded if they cannot operate constitutionally.²²

Discipline

A 503-page report filed with the court in September 2024 by former judge James Yates, titled “Undisciplined, Unpunished,” found that disciplinary guidelines adopted in June 2021, which prescribe a three-day loss of vacation for stop-and-frisk misconduct, are rarely followed. Of 224 substantiated accusations involving 91 officers after the guidelines took effect, only 10 of 61 resolved cases resulted in any vacation-day penalty.²³ Police commissioners routinely dismissed or reduced penalties for substantiated misconduct, often citing officers’ “good faith.” Yates noted that the Supreme Court has never incorporated a good-faith defense into departmental disciplinary proceedings, and he described discipline for supervisors who fail to catch unconstitutional stops as “close to non-existent.”²⁴

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who took over the department in late 2024, said in March 2025 that the department would move beyond retraining as the default response to stop-and-frisk violations. She said she had issued a memo establishing stricter disciplinary standards and had begun tracking compliance data to hold precinct commanders accountable.²⁵

Laws Passed to Add Transparency and Accountability

The New York City Council has passed several laws targeting how the NYPD conducts and reports stops:

The Community Safety Act, passed in 2013 with veto-proof majorities, created an independent Inspector General for the NYPD, housed within the Department of Investigation and operational as of 2014, and expanded the definition of bias-based profiling to include age, gender, housing status, and sexual orientation, letting individuals sue the NYPD in state court over profiling.²⁶²⁷
The Right to Know Act, effective in 2018, requires officers to provide the reason for a stop in certain situations.⁸
The How Many Stops Act, which took effect in July 2024, requires the NYPD to report data on all levels of investigative encounters, including lower-level interactions that previously went untracked. Mayor Adams vetoed the bill and the City Council overrode the veto in January 2024 with a supermajority.²⁸

The first year of How Many Stops Act data revealed 2.7 million police encounters between July 2024 and June 2025. Officers categorized 98% of those encounters at the lowest level. An analysis by the Thurgood Marshall Institute found that Black individuals were significantly more likely than white individuals to be approached at every encounter level, and that precincts with higher percentages of white residents showed the starkest racial disparities.²⁹

Did It Reduce Crime?

The Brennan Center for Justice found no apparent statistical link between stop volume and crime rates. Crime and murder rates continued to fall both while stops were rising and while they were dropping. The largest single-year decline in the murder rate came in 2013, the same year stops fell by nearly two-thirds. The Brennan Center concluded that the near-elimination of the program in January 2014 “did not result in a crime wave,” and attributed crime reductions to data-driven strategies like CompStat.³⁰

Academic work has been more mixed. A 2017 study in Justice Quarterly found that higher levels of stop-and-frisk activity were associated with “small crime reductions,” while cautioning that “the way the policy was implemented precludes strong causal conclusions” and that “strong causal inferences cannot be drawn from observational data of the kind used in this study.”³¹ Peter Zimroth, the first federal monitor, noted that during his tenure the sharp decline in stops occurred “without a consequent increase in crime.”¹⁶

Where Things Stand Now

The NYPD submitted a revised Fourteenth Amendment compliance plan at the end of 2025 that includes a Racial Disparities Review Committee, staffed with academic experts from Harvard and NYU, tasked with using statistical modeling to identify commands where racial disparities are most pronounced.¹⁹³² Negotiations over an overhaul of the department’s disciplinary system stalled in late 2025 over disagreements between the monitor and the city, though the monitor has said she intends to resume the talks in 2026.¹⁸

The core tension in stop-and-frisk in NYC has not moved much in two decades. NYPD officers retain the legal authority to stop and frisk people when reasonable suspicion exists. The department has repeatedly struggled to exercise that authority within constitutional limits. And the New Yorkers who bear the weight of how it is used are still overwhelmingly Black and Latino.

1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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8
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9
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10
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11
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12
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13
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14
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15
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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25
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26
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27
The New York Times. City Council Votes to Increase Oversight of Police Department
28
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29
Thurgood Marshall Institute. How Many Stops Act: Analyzing NYC Police Data
30
Brennan Center for Justice. Ending New York’s Stop-and-Frisk Did Not Increase Crime
31
Taylor & Francis Online. The Relationship Between Crime and Stop, Question, and Frisk Rates in New York City Neighborhoods
32
Officer.com. New NYPD Committee to Study Racial Disparities in Street Stops