Paterson Signs Bill Limiting Stop-and-Frisk Data

July 16, 2010, 11:56 am
By AL BAKER AND COLIN MOYNIHAN---nytimes
Police officials in New York City can no longer electronically store the names and addresses of people stopped in the street to be questioned but found to have done nothing wrong, under a bill Gov. David A. Paterson signed into law on Friday.
At a signing ceremony in his Manhattan offices, Mr. Paterson ended a debate over the so-called stop-and-frisk database that had been raging for months and will fundamentally alter one of the Police Department’s chief crime-fighting strategies.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly have argued that the database, originally created to comply with a law passed by the City Council in 2001, was invaluable because detectives could quickly cull it for clues they needed to solve cases and make arrests.
Stripping the database of the names and addresses of those stopped would result in more crime victims, Mr. Kelly said, who met twice with the governor this month in hopes of persuading him to veto the bill.

But in the end, Mr. Paterson said, “my conscience will not let me veto this bill.”
“There is a principle – which is compatible with the presumption of innocence, and is deeply ingrained in our sense of justice – that individuals wrongly accused of a crime should suffer neither stigma nor adverse consequences by virtue of an arrest or criminal accusation not resulting in conviction,” Mr. Paterson said.
Mr. Paterson was joined by the sponsors of the bill – Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Eric L. Adams – who voiced their support for the governor’s decision and said the issue boiled down to finding a balance between law and order and civil liberties.
“This is a tremendous victory for all fair-minded New Yorkers,” Assemblyman Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, said.
He said he believed that “reasonable efforts” to attain public safety must be “tempered by the privacy rights of law abiding people.”
Mr. Adams, a Brooklyn Democrat who had served 22 years on the Police Department before being elected to the Senate, said, “We do not allow the police in our country to hold the personal information of innocent people regardless of their ethnicity. This is wrong.”
Many pitched the debate forward – saying that the broader context of the department’s stop-and-frisk campaign could now be examined, with officials focusing on the “quality” of the street stops.
In 2009, the police documented 581,000 stops and have recorded nearly three million stops since 2004.
It is unclear how many of the people whose information is stored in the database were not fined or arrested after being stopped.
In a letter to Mr. Kelly on Thursday, Assemblyman Jeffries asked him to provide “the total number of people whose personal information is contained in the electronic N.Y.P.D. database.” He said he wanted to know how many of them had not been charged with a crime or issued a summons.
The new law applies only to the New York City Police Department, not agencies around the state. Under the law, the database would still include a record of the stop and catalog its points of data – including where and when the stop took place, the age and race of the person stopped and the reason that prompted the officer to make it.
Late on Thursday, as word circulated that Mr. Paterson would sign the bill, a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg expressed dismay.
“We’re disappointed that police officers will be denied an important tool they have been using to solve crimes and prevent others,” said the spokesman, Stu Loeser.
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