City Hall probably had little choice but to scuttle its stop-and-frisk database as part of a legal settlement, despite its effectiveness as a crime-fighting tool.
For that, you can thank the state Legislature, particularly Sen. Eric Adams and then-Assemblyman (now Rep.) Hakeem Jeffries. It was their misguided 2010 bill, signed by then-Gov. David Paterson, that did all the damage.
Since 2004, the NYPD has been compiling data on everyone subjected to stop-question-frisk — ironically, to settle an earlier lawsuit charging racial bias. The resulting database has been used both to keep racial statistics and to fight crime.
The Adams-Jeffries bill prevented the NYPD from storing info on those stopped but not charged. The New York Civil Liberties Union then sued to remove the names of anyone charged, but whose cases were either dismissed or reduced to a non-criminal offense. To settle the suit, the NYPD this week agreed to remove all remaining names within 90 days.
At least it won’t be as big a hit on the NYPD’s crime-fighting abilities as it might have been: Some 90 percent of the names were deleted under the 2010 bill, which essentially rendered the database little more than a shell. And the city continues to mount a vigorous defense of stop-and-frisk in three ongoing lawsuits, given its proven effectiveness in making New York safe.
Those determined to limit stop-and-frisk need to keep in mind that minority communities — whose members make up the vast majority of crime victims — are its biggest beneficiaries. More generally, if New York is to remain safe, crime-fighting must be an ongoing battle. And cops need all the effective tools they can get.