SDS 189: Data and Social Justice
Lindsay Poirier
Statistical & Data Sciences, Smith College
Fall 2023
Dan Nguyen, 2019
We therefore request that the Department produce the following: in electronic form, the complete NYPD database of information entered from stop-and-frisk worksheets for 2006, for the first two quarters of 2007; and for any calendar year prior to 2006 for which data exists in electronic form. We expressly exclude from this request individually identifiable information or other private individual information that may be in the database: the name of the person stopped, the street address of the person stopped, and the Tax ID number of the officer who completed the form. To the extent you have questions about this request, we are ready to discuss it with appropriate members of your staff. Otherwise, we ask that the Department produce the database as quickly as possible and by no later than August 31, 2007.
Because it is impossible to individually analyze each of those stops, plaintiffs’ case was based on the imperfect information contained in the NYPD’s database of forms (‘UF-250s’) that officers are required to prepare after each stop. The central flaws in this database all skew toward underestimating the number of unconstitutional stops that occur: the database is incomplete, in that officers do not prepare a UF-250 for every stop they make; it is one-sided, in that the UF250 only records the officer’s version of the story; the UF-250 permits the officer to merely check a series of boxes, rather than requiring the officer to explain the basis for her suspicion; and many of the boxes on the form are inherently subjective and vague (such as ‘furtive movements’). Nonetheless, the analysis of the UF-250 database reveals that at least 200,000 stops were made without reasonable suspicion.