NYPD officers too often stop Black and Hispanic drivers without justification, a lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges.
The suit, filed in Manhattan Federal Court by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defender Services, comes after a city law went into effect at the start of 2022 requiring officers to document every vehicle stop — as well as stops of non-vehicles like bicycles — whether or not enforcement action is taken.
During the first three years under the new law, police made more than 2 million traffic stops, issued 1.8 million tickets, made 68,000 arrests and searched 57,000 vehicles, according to police data and a NYCLU analysis.
But the NYCLU noted that while Blacks and Hispanics make up 22% and 23% of the driving population in the city, they were stopped at a higher rate, with Blacks making up 32% of stops and Hispanics 30%.
White drivers were behind the wheel in 23% of the stops, despite making up 38% of drivers.
When enforcement action was taken — such as a summons issued or an arrest made — the racial disparities were even starker, the NYCLU says.
Blacks and Hispanics made up 90% of the arrests, with Blacks 10 times more likely to be searched than whites, and Hispanics six times more likely than whites to be searched.
“Far too many Black and Latino drivers in New York City are treated like criminals when their vehicles are searched during what should be routine traffic stops, merely because of the color of their skin,” said Daniel Lambright, a top lawyer for the Civil Liberties Union. “The NYPD’s targeting of Black and Latino drivers with baseless vehicle searches is nothing more than stop and frisk on wheels, and it must come to an end.”
Accusations by the NYCLU that drivers in predominantly minority neighborhoods are stopped as a pretext to look for guns — even though the NYPD data shows weapons were found in about 4% of all vehicle searches — mirrors the controversy that dogged the nation’s largest police force when a federal judge in 2013 ruled the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional.
That decision, met with a sharp rebuttal by then-NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, resonates today, with the NYPD still under the watchful eye of a court-appointed federal monitor.
The NYPD has adopted a number of changes recommended by the monitor, even as it has maintained it does not engage in racial profiling.
The suit names as plaintiffs the NAACP and two Black men, one of whom, Justin Cohen , 35, said he was stopped in 2023 for allegedly speeding by officers who illegally searched him, seized his car and arrested him — before finally being released with a speeding ticket that was ultimately dismissed,
“My ordeal at the hands of the NYPD adds to a long list of horrific stories about driving while Black and racial profiling,” Cohen said. “This traumatizing experience has left a lasting impact on me.”
