About 90% of drivers searched or arrested by the NYPD in 2022 were Black or Latino

The first comprehensive data set on the NYPD’s use of vehicle stops shows that police pulled over hundreds of thousands of drivers last year — and about 90% of the people searched or arrested in those stops were Black or Latino.

Police stopped a total of more than 670,000 drivers in 2022 — roughly equivalent to the total population of Washington, D.C. That’s about the same number of pedestrians NYPD officers stopped in 2011, at the height of the stop-and-frisk era. The NYPD has never released vehicle stop numbers before, so it’s impossible to know how last year’s data compares to prior years.

While most stops only resulted in a summons for a minor violation, officers searched and arrested Black and Latino drivers at far higher rates than white drivers, according to data obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union and shared with Gothamist. When police used force during traffic stops and recorded the person’s race, the person they used force against was a person of color about 92% of the time, the data shows.

“As with the pedestrian stops during the height of stop and frisk, we are now seeing numbers where it’s quite clear that Black and Latino drivers are being singled out for the most aggressive police activity,” said Christopher Dunn, the NYCLU's legal director. “That’s a source of a lot of concern.”

The NYPD said the new data is just a “baseline” and that the department is still working to analyze and understand the numbers.

“But make no mistake,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Whether for street encounters or vehicle stops, both are fundamental tools in a thoughtful and multilayered public safety approach practiced by the NYPD to keep all New Yorkers safe and free from fear.”

Traffic stops are among the most common interactions between police and the public, and departments often tout them as a tool to increase road safety and search for evidence of more serious crimes. But experts and advocates for police reform have noted that the tactic disproportionately affects people of color and can escalate into violence. After the fatal police beating of Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop in Memphis, some are once again casting doubt on the effectiveness of car stops, noting that they put both drivers and officers in danger and rarely turn up evidence of a serious crime.

The new vehicle stop data from the NYPD shows that the department’s hundreds of thousands of vehicle stops in 2022 rarely resulted in arrests. Officers made an arrest only about 2.2% of the time. About 77% of stops resulted in a summons for a minor violation, like driving with a broken tail light.

The most common types of arrests were for license violations and possession of a forged instrument, which is often brought against people who violate license plate rules. In contrast, police made just 631 arrests for second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, accounting for about 4% of arrests.

“We see time and time and time again that traffic stops generate enormous harm, and they do so for very little benefit,” Dunn said.

While pedestrian stops have been the subject of intense scrutiny in New York City in recent years, the new vehicle stops data provides an unprecedented look at a form of policing that, until recently, was used by the NYPD with little transparency. In 2021, the City Council passed a law requiring police to record and share quarterly reports on car stop numbers, broken down by race, gender and several other factors.

A City Council spokesperson called the first batch of numbers “alarming.”

“Police departments across the nation have been moving away from vehicle stops because of the evidence showing they too often escalate and lead to tragic incidents and can extract resources from communities through fines and fees with severe disparities,” spokesperson Rendy Desamours said in a statement. “This first-ever year of data on vehicle stops in New York City shows why this initial transparency was so critical.”

‘Use stops as an investigative moment’

Farhang Heydari, executive director of NYU’s Policing Project, questioned whether vehicle stops are actually making the roads safer.

“Are we finding lots of people with murder warrants and violent, you know, people who have committed violent crimes? Or are we just arresting people who can’t afford to pay traffic tickets or other kinds of fines?” he said. “I’m just very skeptical that this tactic is accomplishing anything.”

The Policing Project has studied the costs and benefits of car stops. It has also helped police departments revise their training and policies, and has written draft legislation for governments to better track and regulate departments’ use of vehicle stops.

Heydari said many departments rely on so-called pretextual stops, when they pull someone over for a minor traffic violation to look for evidence of a more serious crime. For instance, they might pull someone over for failing to signal before changing lanes, then search the car for guns and drugs.

Heydari said officers also learn that traffic stops can become deadly at any moment. While the vast majority of traffic stops do not turn violent, Heydari said that the training officers receive about the hazards of traffic stops can cause things to “easily spiral out of control.”

“Everyone’s fearful for their life,” he said. “And police are constantly trained that, ‘You’re the one that needs to go home. Do everything you can to go home tonight.’”

Cars stops gone wrong

Researchers have found that the statistical chances of an officer being killed during a traffic stop, other than from a crash, are less than one in a million.

The NYPD has shot multiple civilians during vehicle stops in recent years.

Since the attorney general’s Office of Special Investigation started investigating all killings by law enforcement in the state in 2021, the NYPD has killed two people during vehicle stops.

Officers also shot but did not kill a teenager during a traffic stop last year. Luis Monsanto, then an 18-year-old student at Cardinal Hayes High School, was driving in the Bronx last March. Police shot him in the head just seconds after turning on their cruiser lights to pull him over, according to video footage released by the NYPD.

Police said Monsanto had run multiple red lights and that officers fired at him after he started driving toward them. Monsanto’s family has sued the city and the officers involved in the incident, arguing that Monsanto tried to drive away because he felt threatened, and that he didn’t put the officers in physical danger. The Bronx district attorney’s office is investigating the case.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates claims of police misconduct, has substantiated hundreds of complaints against officers accused of violating policy during traffic stops in the last decade.

Peter Moskos, a law enforcement expert at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said vehicle stops can play an important role when policing neighborhoods with high levels of crime. But he said that “it depends if it’s done right.”

“It’s almost impossible to tease that from the data,” he said. “You’ve got to sort of go out there with the units and see what they’re doing. And are they doing it intelligently or just, you know, randomly stopping people to produce numbers?”

Moskos said tracking vehicle stops could end up having the opposite of its intended effect: pressuring officers to prove their productivity by pulling over more people, just as they used to do with pedestrian stops and frisks.

The police department has overhauled its approach to pedestrian stops in recent years, after a federal class-action lawsuit accused the NYPD of widespread racial profiling, and the numbers have dropped substantially — though they have started to tick back up under the administration of Mayor Eric Adams.

“You’ve just got to watch out for those numbers,” Moskos said, “because it’s hard to quantify policing.”