Paterson Signing Bill Ending Massive Stop and Frisk Database

Despite considerable pressure from Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, Governor Paterson will today sign legislation ending the NYPD's electronic database of innocent individuals who wind up on the receiving end of the controversial "stop and frisk" policy. Kelly met personally with Paterson twice this week to ask him to veto the bill, presenting the governor with summaries of 170 cases since 2007 in which he said the database proved pivotal in identifying and apprehending perps. According to the Times, those included 17 murders, 36 robberies and 8 sex crimes.

But after reviewing the first 25 cases presented by Kelly, the Times reports that "it was sometimes difficult to determine how the information from the street stops had been crucial in solving the crimes." NYPD officers stopped and questioned or frisked people more than 575,000 times last year, the most ever. According to the NYCLU, nearly nine out of 10 of those stopped and questioned by police last year were neither arrested nor issued a summons, and more than 80 percent were black or Latino. Whether they were arrested or not, their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information were entered into the database.

During a radio interview yesterday, Paterson said, "I think the agreement would be that people who are found to be doing nothing wrong in the United States of America should not have information about them floating around the Police Department, but if there is a value to it, well that's a different story." The database will now still include a record of the stop, including the person’s age and race and the location and reason for it, which the City Council required in order to evaluate the racial element of the stop and frisk policy.

But Big Brother Kelly wants you to know that by not keeping innocent people in his precious database, Paterson is making the city unsafe! "Without it, there will be, inevitably, killers and other criminals who won't be captured as quickly or perhaps ever," Kelly said in a statement. "They'll be free to threaten our neighborhoods longer than they would have been otherwise. Albany has robbed us of a great crime-fighting tool, one that saved lives." And for the cherry on top, here's the reaction from our favorite law enforcement reactionaries over at NYPD Rant: "This bill was crafted to hinder the Police/NYPD by the usual race hustlers and criminal lovers." Criminals—we love 'em!

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By John Del Signore in News on July 16, 2010 12:03 PM

Comments [rss]

fishfajitas

Misinformation re: SQF

- S.S. numbers are NOT recorded on SQF forms

Kevin Bracken

Most of the time I reflect on how cool it would be if NYC were its own state - but things like this almost make up for being attached to Albany.

Actually no, not good enough. Unshackle upstate, so we can be more progressive down here.

wow 14th street

Perhaps the numbers of those innocent people questioned

by the NYPD just reflect the racial count numbers of our NYS prison population?.

I agree this was wrong to keep files on

the innocent just to have a data base and should be an ACLU matter in the courts for a long time .

I also think in the digital age nothing gets removed.

inoyourider

Good deal.

I think stop and frisk is a good idea when deployed properly, but keeping people's info is waaay over the line.

napalm

Hahahahaha. First, BloomBaloni looses the Labron sweepstakes which BloomBaloni kneeled and begged and basically offered Labron a BJ for his own personal financial gain, and now him and Ray kerik get runoff their racist hate-filled warpath against innocent minorities.

Guest

off topic, but i have a question for you:

"Capital punishment for dog killers: Yes or No?"

napalm

It isn't always that humans receive CP for killing "humans".

You can rearrange the Q if you'd like

Guest

actually, that answers the question. thanks!

Kelles

but what if this is used as an excuse for a rise in crime rate?

jpeditor

"Excuse"?

MWU-HA-HA.....

fuboy

Yeah! Win for Paterson and basic Human Rights.

ur doing it rong

It's so funny, the other day i was reading the bill of rights and it skipped right from 3 to . So strange, wait what's stop and frisk?

ur doing it rong

**3 to 5.

(wtf keyboard thx alot)

GOP

How many of you idiots above got stopped and frisked?

jaycjay

Since the majority of Gothamist commenters are white, probably none. How is that at all relevant?

I could list any number of things that haven't happened to me that I believe should not happen to anyone. Thanks to being to able to think logically, I don't have to personally experience something in order to understand it.

GOP

Right, you can opine on things that haven't happened to you, but a person that is in a better position to opine is someone who this has happened to directly. You wouldn't be asked to opine on financial reform (unless you're a PhD in econ). You wouldn't be asked to opine on many things. But liberal whites all opine on things they think are needed, without even being directly effected by such things (i.e., healthcare reform). My point is that the only ppl that don't want stop and frisk are ppl that are suspect. If I know that I wouldn't be stopped and frisked, or if I'm part of the class of persons that would get stopped and frisked, but I know that I've done nothing wrong, this wouldn't matter to me.