amNewYork<\/a>, highlights a disconnect that reform advocates have complained about for years: the NYPD often believes its officers are doing nothing wrong when they randomly stop-and-frisk minorities.\u00a0<\/p>\nIn the first half of 2025, NYPD supervisors deemed 99% of stops lawful, according to the report. But the monitor\u2019s audits found 11% were unconstitutional.<\/p>\n
That gap, the report suggests, is not a paperwork problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Supervisors \u201croutinely approve stops, frisks, and searches as lawful even when they are not,\u201d the monitor wrote, urging the department to move beyond training and start disciplining officers and supervisors who repeatedly violate legal standards.<\/p>\n
There is \u201cno excuse,\u201d the report added, for the same failures year after year.<\/p>\n
The department has rolled out a series of initiatives meant to prove it is serious about reform, including ComplianceStat. That\u2019s modeled after the NYPD\u2019s famous CompStat crime-tracking system. The NYPD has also launched an Early Intervention Program designed to identify officers with problematic behavior, according to the report.<\/p>\n
The monitor acknowledged those programs show promise on paper but said they have so far fallen short.<\/p>\n
One example detailed in the report involved Brooklyn South patrol commands that were repeatedly called back to ComplianceStat meetings after auditors found officers \u2014 many assigned to specialized anti-crime units \u2014 failing to document stops captured on body-camera video.<\/p>\n
When commanders finally imposed meaningful consequences, such as removing officers from units, issuing discipline and restructuring teams, compliance improved dramatically.<\/p>\n
But the gains didn\u2019t last.<\/p>\n
By early 2026, some of the same problems resurfaced, with officers returned to specialized teams and misconduct patterns reappearing, according to the report.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The lesson, the monitor concluded, is straightforward: reform works when top brass demands accountability and collapses when it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Residents of NYC Deserve No Less\u2019<\/p>\n
The report also detailed how commanders sometimes view officers who generate complaints or questionable stops.<\/p>\n
In some cases, supervisors characterized problematic officers as simply being an \u201cactive cop,\u201d effectively excusing behavior that should trigger intervention, the monitor said.<\/p>\n
Even officers with multiple complaints from the Civilian Complaint Review Board were not consistently flagged early in the system, the monitor found.<\/p>\n
That failure undercuts one of the core goals of reform: preventing misconduct before it escalates.<\/p>\n
The report also highlights a long-running concern at the heart of the stop-and-frisk controversy \u2014 encounters initiated solely based on an officer\u2019s own observations are far more likely to violate the law.<\/p>\n
Nearly half of all reported stops fall into that category, the monitor found, and compliance rates are dramatically lower than when officers respond to 911 calls or information from witnesses.<\/p>\n
In the first half of 2025, self-initiated stops were deemed lawful about 79% of the time, compared with roughly 97% of stops stemming from radio runs. The gap widened further for frisks and searches, where self-initiated encounters were lawful just 64% and 53% of the time.<\/p>\n
The problem is especially pronounced in specialized NYPD units, including Neighborhood Safety Teams and similar anti-crime squads, where most encounters are self-initiated. Audits found only 75% of stops by Neighborhood Safety Team officers were lawful, and compliance was even lower for some other units.<\/p>\n
Yet supervisors reviewing those same encounters concluded only about 1% were unconstitutional.<\/p>\n
The monitor warned the department is unlikely to meet court-ordered compliance targets for those units, despite leadership restructuring specialized teams late last year to eliminate Public Safety Teams and shift officers into other assignments.<\/p>\n
The report also found that officers continue to fail to document a significant share of stops.<\/p>\n
Audits in 2025 showed that about 71% of stops reviewed were properly documented, an improvement from roughly 61% the year before, but still far below acceptable levels, the monitor said. Nearly one-third of stops identified through audits were not recorded even when documentation was legally required.<\/p>\n
When stops aren\u2019t documented, unlawful encounters are harder to detect, supervisors cannot identify patterns of misconduct, and public trust erodes, the report noted.<\/p>\n
Efforts to overhaul the department\u2019s disciplinary system have also stalled.<\/p>\n
A working group formed in 2025 to implement recommendations from an outside discipline review \u2014 led by former judge James Yates \u2014 initially made progress toward a series of reforms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But negotiations broke down late last year after the city signaled it would only agree to a small number of the proposals, prompting frustration from the monitor and other parties.<\/p>\n
The monitor said she hopes to resume negotiations with the city and the NYPD in 2026, emphasizing that meaningful discipline remains a critical link to changing officer behavior.<\/p>\n
Without consistent discipline for rank-and-file cops and supervisors, the NYPD may never reach compliance, the report warned, adding that oversight was never meant to be permanent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe residents of NYC deserve no less,\u201d the monitor wrote, \u201cand there should not be a permanent monitor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a decade after a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department\u2019s stop-and-frisk practices violated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-146745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}