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The NYPD announced several steps to amend their controversial stop and frisk policy on the eve of a hearing by the City’s Public Safety Committee last week, but opponents have called the measures “smoke and mirrors.”

The changes include a pilot program in three precincts that will require officers to hand out a card to individuals listing the legal authority for the stop and common reasons justifying it. The NYPD has also revised the patrol guide, which will require officers to provide an explanation.

“It probably helps a little bit, but it’s not dealing with the real problems,” said Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “People can be stopped for ‘reasonable suspicion,’ but when you get to a point that nine out of 10 people who are stopped have done nothing wrong, it raises a serious question about whether people being stopped because of some reasonable suspicion or for some other reason.”

The issue has come to a head in recent years as the rates for stop and frisks has gone up dramatically — reaching a total of 531,159 reported stops in 2008 — a more than five fold increase since 2002.

Even more alarming is the racial breakdown of the stops, which show that non-whites make up roughly 90 percent of those targeted. In the wake of the Sean Bell shooting in 2006, the NYPD commissioned the RAND Corporation to assess these statistics to see if the department was engaging in racial bias policing, which yielded a complex and controversial analysis.

Greg Ridgeway, a senior statistician for the RAND Corporation with a Ph. D. in statistics, is a leading researcher in racial bias in policing and authored the study, a summary of which was presented at the recent hearings.

He testified that while “raw statistics for these encounters suggest large racial disparities… [these] comparisons to the Census, while they are the most widely used, are not suitable for assessing racial bias.”

Instead, Ridgeway analyzed stop and frisk rates against crime-suspect descriptions, which he said “are independent of the police and, unlike the Census, is linked to suspicious activity.” He admitted this method poses its own problems, including potential bias in who is reported to the police and possibly excluding crimes that have no witnesses, such as trespassing.

Another factor for the racial discrepancy is the much higher concentration of police officers in minority neighborhoods.

According to this benchmark, the study found that blacks were stopped at a rate of 20-30 percent lower than their representation in crime-suspect descriptions, while Hispanics were stopped 5-10 percent higher.

Compared to a racial breakdown of arrestees, the number of stop and frisks targeted blacks at roughly the same rate as their arrest numbers, while Hispanics were targeted 6 percent higher.

The other troubling statistic from the NYPD – that only one in 10 of the reported frisks actually yielded an actionable offense – has critics outraged at the negative consequences of such a blanket approach, especially to law-abiding minorities that are targeted.

“If you stop 50 people in a community, somebody will have a gun or drugs or whatever. That’s the strategy; it’s a game of numbers. That one person you get justifies it. So you can say you stopped a crime. That’s what it’s designed for,” said Noel Leader, a recently retired NYPD sergeant and co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.

“There’s a lot of dislike of police officers because of all these unnecessary stops and harassment. What I was taught in academy is that we’re hunters, not fisherman,” Leader said. “Now they’re making them like fisherman, to cast a big nets and pull in what you can. It’s counterproductive and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Leader also alleges that the number of stop and frisk incidents is greatly underreported because the required paperwork is often never filed.

Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Astoria), the chairman of the Public Safety Committee, disagrees. While he said there are many problems with the stop and frisk policy, it can be “a great law enforcement tool when done properly. It is a proactive way to get guns off the street before crimes are committed and not after the drive-by shooting kills a little girl.

“One of the legitimate areas of concern is the low rate of return on these stop and frisks,” said Vallone, “but that has to be weighed against their value in crime reduction. Look at the dramatic drop in crime – the proof is in the pudding.”

Dunn disagrees: “Crime has gone down in the City for a long time now. The crime numbers have dropped since the 1990s, but frisks only went up in 2004. For this policy to explain crime going down, they’d have to show a precipitous decline in crime in the last few years, which just isn’t supported by the data.”

The Civilian Complaint Review Board, which handles independent complaints against the NYPD, showed that complaints regarding stop and frisks have nearly tripled since 2002, to a total of 2,466 complaints in 2006. The CCRB can be reached by calling 311.

If stopped in the street by police:
• Remain calm
• Do not reach into your pockets.
• Ask why you are being stopped.
• Do not become loud.
• Keep some legitimate form of identification on you at all times.
• Remain silent. You have the right of silence, use it.
• You always have the right for legal representation – never speak without a witness being present.

You can legally be stopped by the police if:
• You are running and a crime has just been reported in the area.
• You are hanging around with some people who are under police investigation
• You are near an area where a crime has just been reported.
• You are somewhere where an officer thinks people have no reason to be at that time of day or night.
• You are acting in a way that appears to the officer to be very suspicious and you act even more suspicious when the officer sees you have spotted her/him.
• An officer thinks that you have stolen property in your possession.
• An officer stops you walking and you refuse to answer simple questions, give false or evasive answers or make contradicting statements.
• Someone has pointed you out to an officer.
• You begin to bad-mouth an officer.