Pubdate: Wed, 01 Dec 1999 Source: Newsday (NY) Copyright: 1999, Newsday Inc. Contact: (516)843-2986 Website: http://www.newsday.com/ Author: Graham Rayman, Staff Writer REPORT SHOWS WHO COPS STOP New York City police officers stopped and frisked blacks and Hispanics at a disproportionately higher rate than whites, according to an eight-month investigation by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. A review of 175,000 stop-and-frisk reports-known as UF-250s-filed between January, 1998 and March, 1999 also found that one in nine stops resulted in an arrest. One in seven reports did not meet the legal standard of "reasonable suspicion" required to justify the tactic. Spitzer was not available for an interview yesterday, but in a prepared statement, he said: "The perception that minority residents have been disproportionately stopped and frisked by the police is based in reality." He did not address whether the findings indicated evidence of racial profiling. "We can have good, tough policing and a lower crime rate without infringing on people's basic constitutional rights," he said, adding that "better training and supervision of officers should be looked at." Spitzer began the investigation after the fatal shooting in February of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo by four officers with the Street Crime Unit. Police Department critics charged that stop-and-frisk tactics unfairly targeted minorities and violated their civil rights. The mayor's office declined to comment. In a prepared statement released yesterday, Police Commissioner Howard Safir criticized Spitzer's report, saying it "fails to raise any new issues concerning the Police Department's stop-and-frisk practices." "The race of the individuals stopped strongly correlates with the descriptions of persons committing violent crime as identified by their victims," Safir said, repeating an argument he made in April. "Ignoring this fact is a critical flaw of the report, as it is these descriptions that serve as the primary basis for stops by police." Spitzer found, however, that even when higher crime rates in minority neighborhoods were taken into account, blacks were stopped 23 percent more and Hispanics 39 percent more often than whites. In addition, blacks were twice as likely as whites to be stopped on suspicion of committing a violent crime or carrying a weapon. The rate was similar for Hispanics. "Only 30 percent of stops are based upon the victim's description," Spitzer said in a written statement. Overall, blacks make up 25 percent of the city population, but 50 percent of the people stopped, while Hispanics make up 24 percent of the population, but 33 percent of those stopped, the report said. Whites, on the other hand, make up 43 percent of the population, but just 13 percent of the people stopped. Spitzer's report also questioned whether police officers had enough legal justification when they stopped civilians. Under the law, an officer must have evidence that a crime has been, is or is about to be committed. Department policy also allows the tactic when officers believe their lives are in danger. 46rom a cross section of 10,000 UF-250s filed in eight precincts, Spitzer's analysts found about 1,500 did not meet the "reasonable suspicion" requirement. Also, 2,500 of the forms did not contain enough information for Spitzer's office to judge whether the stop was justified. Almost one-in-four reports filed by the Street Crime Unit did not contain a sufficient legal basis for the stop. The 175,000 reports were collected from precincts across the city, typed into computers by the Police Department over the spring and summer and turned over to Spitzer's office, which worked with the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University. In an unusual arrangement yesterday, Spitzer's office released a summary of the report and a news release to the four daily newspapers with the provision that only the Police Department and the mayor's office be contacted for comment. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea