People who are stopped and frisked in the city’s most crime-ridden precincts are now getting a business card for their troubles.
Under intense pressure from civil-rights groups and lawsuits slamming the practice, the NYPD has instructed its officers to hand out explainer cards that vaguely describe the behavior they’re targeting in such stops.
The pilot program began 10 days ago in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, the Bronx’s 44th Precinct and Manhattan’s 32nd Precinct, which have the city’s highest stop-and-frisk rates.
An officer can “stop, question and possibly frisk” people if he or she “reasonably suspects that a person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a felony or a Penal Law misdemeanor,” the 3-by-5-inch card says.
On the back are “common reasons” cops might stop people, including “sights or sounds suggestive of criminal activity,” “carrying what appears to be a weapon” or “concealing a weapon or item” used in a crime.
Also, the card says cops might be responding to a “report of suspicious or suspected criminal behavior.”
Cops stopped, frisked and searched more than 500,000 people in the city last year. A civil-rights lawsuit charges the stops are racially motivated, since 80 percent of those stopped are black or Hispanic.
“There are people suing us, there is always discussions about it,” a police official said. “We have chronic critics continuing to raise racial-profiling issues.”
The official said the decision to start handing out the cards evolved out of the department’s concern over the issue — and not the suit.
A study commissioned by police to defend the suit — and conducted by RAND Corp., a public-policy think tank — found cops weren’t racially profiling. But the group said cops’ failure to explain why people were being stopped was a concern.
“What we are hoping to accomplish here is to give people a little more information of what the procedure is and why it’s being done,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday. “Stop-and-frisk procedure is a difficult thing for us and for the public.”
Lawyers say the explanations on the back of the card don’t go very far, since it’s impossible to summarize on such a small card the very elaborate rules of stop-and-frisks.
Additional reporting by Murray Weiss and Sally Goldenberg