How Will ‘How Many Stops’ Actually Work?

At the end of January, the New York City Council overrode Mayor Eric Adams’ veto, passing into law the How Many Stops Act. The law will require the police to document the age, race and gender of all stops they make; explain why they made the stop and whether it escalated from one level to another; detail the final level of the stop; and note whether there was force used during the stop. 

Political debate over the bill was heated, with opponents including the mayor saying its passage would be a disaster for the NYPD that would burden officers with paperwork and make it less likely they would engage in constructive community policing. Supporters defended the bill as a basic transparency measure that would reveal whether interactions with the public are happening in a racially disproportionate manner.

Was the public debate rooted in reality? What distinguishes Level 1, 2 and 3 stops in the real world? How do the actual paperwork demands on police compare to those being asserted by politicians? What is likely to be the message absorbed by cops being given a significant additional reporting responsibility?

We talked through these and other questions with two NYPD veterans who have different opinions on the wisdom of the bill. Kenneth Corey, now with the University of Chicago Crime Lab, was the NYPD’s chief of department in 2022, the highest-ranking uniformed position in the department. Prior to that, he served in a dozen different roles, beginning as a cadet in 1998.

Tracie Keesee, who is the co-founder, president and chief operating officer of the Center for Policing Equity, previously served as the NYPD’s first-ever deputy commissioner of equity and inclusion and as its deputy commissioner of training. Prior to that, she served for 25 years in the Denver Police Department.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Vital City: What does this law do? 

Tracie Keesee: It is adding in what we would call Level 1 and Level 2 encounters to data-collection mandates that already apply to Level 3 stops. Level 1 engagements are officers gathering information. Level 2 stops are when officers have some reason to believe an individual might be engaged in criminal activity. Level 3 stops, which require reasonable suspicion, are already being recorded.

VC: Ken, is that consistent with the way you understand it?

Kenneth Corey: The only thing I would underscore is that the Level 1 encounter isn’t predicated on any level of suspicion. It would include a detective knocking on doors looking for witnesses, where the person that they’re talking to is not under suspicion and the detective is just trying to gather information.

VC: If I’m a police officer on the ground and I’m interacting with someone, do I automatically know this is a Level 1, this is a Level 2, this is a Level 3 stop before the stop begins? Or is that an after-the-fact judgment? 

KC: Sometimes they don’t know after the stop what level they’re at. And that’s one of the issues around this. It’s a very confusing area of law. And it is one that is more confusing in New York, I think, than in a lot of other states, because most other states make these stops based on the U.S. Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, which laid out that these stops were legally permissible, but had to be based on reasonable suspicion. The New York State Court of Appeals took it a step further in the De Bour decision. And that’s where these levels come from. Though the court is trying to simplify Terry, it actually makes it much more complicated.

When we were training around stops and investigative encounters, we had reached out to the DAs’ offices asking for help, asking, “Could you provide prosecutors to help us retrain all of our cops, since you have an understanding of this?” And a very senior prosecutor in one of the offices actually laughed and said, “De Bour is completely unteachable.” He said, “In a literal reading of De Bour, an officer could say, ‘Hello,’ but if they said, ‘How are you?’ You’ve now set up an investigative encounter.”

Obviously that was partly tongue-in-cheek, but there are circumstances in which even the stop-and-frisk monitor’s team, which reviews Level 3 stops, can’t agree whether or not the officer actually had reasonable suspicion at the time that they did the stop. 

VC: Give me a classic example of a Level 1 stop.

KC: There’s a homicide and a detective walking down the street just asking people, “Did you see what happened here? Did you see anything? Can you provide me with any information?” An officer canvassing for a missing person, showing people a flyer, asking, “Hey, did you see this child?” An officer chasing a suspect loses sight of him, sees somebody on the street and says, “Hey, where’d that guy go?” In all those cases, the officer knows that they don’t have suspicion.

Where it gets more confusing is at Level 2 because that’s actually accusatory in nature. “I think that you are doing something wrong. I actually suspect you of some criminal wrongdoing, but I am not at the level of reasonable suspicion where I can legally make that stop.” Now, again, I’m free to walk up to you to ask you questions, but you are also free to ignore me and just continue walking on, and I can’t do anything about that. 

At Level 3, I actually have to have reasonable suspicion, an articulable belief that you are engaged in some sort of criminal activity, which would allow me to detain you briefly and conduct an investigation and under appropriate circumstances, do a frisk, which is a patdown of the exterior of your clothing.

Level 2 is: I have some suspicion, but it’s not sufficient. And it may be nothing more than an instinct. You’re walking down the street and you’re peering in car windows. I am going to suspect that you’re probably looking to break into a car, but you haven’t done anything yet. You haven’t done anything that gives rise to the fact that you are about to commit a crime. You could just be a car buff who likes looking at the interiors of cars, and your behavior could be completely innocent. 

Now, if you’re looking in cars and you’re trying door handles of multiple cars, that’s going to take me to that higher level of reasonable suspicion.

VC: Tracie, did you want to add anything to that?

TK: I want to go back to the training of officers. Cops used to be called “street lawyers.” The reason why this is so difficult is because if you have DAs who can’t teach them, how can you imagine officers being able to discern when they have moved through the levels? De Bour created a whole level of nuanced confusion where most departments across the country are very clear. Even as they move through the different levels, a lot of the officers can’t articulate to you when they moved. And that’s a big thing, because you’re talking about the ability to apply the law in a way that’s fair. 

VC: Can you put this in context and explain the forms, virtual and on paper, that a cop already fills out today? How much of the job is just going out there, interacting with people? 

KC: In an arrest situation, there’s a tremendous amount of paperwork that’s going to get filled out.

When you’re talking about a normal encounter, right now, prior to the law going into effect, an officer who has that Level 1 or Level 2 encounter does no paperwork if it goes no further. For a Level 3 encounter, the officer is going to fill out a stop, question and frisk report, what’s informally known inside the department as a UF-250. A lot of those are electronic now, on the officer’s smartphone. A lot of their paperwork is electronic — when people complain that officers are always looking at their phones, sometimes they’re actually doing police work. Sometimes they’re not, they’re scrolling social media like the rest of the world. I get that. 

As far as the paperwork burden that this will create, it is not going to be anywhere near as taxing as the mayor says it’s going to be, nor is it going to be as simple as the public advocate and the speaker say it’s going to be. It’s going to fall someplace in the middle.

Take a scenario where you get a couple people shot inside of a nightclub and the police show up, and there are 200 people inside the place; that’s 200 Level 1 stops. At a minimum, they’re Level 1s. Just asking, “Did you see what happened here?”

Is it going to take a minute, two minutes to hit this dropdown on a phone? I don’t know what the form looks like. It hasn’t been created, or if it has, I haven’t seen it. 

VC: Tracie, how would you describe the paperwork burden currently on cops?

TK: First, I want to go back to something that Corey said that was really important here because we still use the term “paperwork.” When he and I first came on, it was paperwork, it was mountains of paperwork. And we’re talking now about the use of technology, which really does cut down on the paperwork, but it brings with it other issues. It’s not just how quickly you can input this in your phone, it's how it reduces the burden of having to do multiple pieces of paper for one event. 

We also have to understand that the reliance on technology also brings with it other safety issues. As Corey mentioned, you have cops looking down and not being aware of what’s going on around them.

Then there are other burdens of technology: What happens when it goes down? What happens if we miss the information or the information isn’t captured?

We also have to make sure that we are securing the data — and making it public in an anonymized way so that people can analyze it. 

And yes, you will have cops who will try to game the system. And you need to be aware of all of those things. 

VC: How many Level 1 stops are there? Do we have any idea?

KC: The Level 3 stops are in the mid-tens-of-thousands per year. I would expect every patrol officer, every detective who’s catching cases, to have multiple Level 1 encounters every day, and even a handful of Level 2s. So you can multiply about 30,000 officers by 2 per day by about 300 days a year and get a broad estimate.

VC: So these days, when do 250s get filled out? 

KC: If they’re not racing to another call, then they might take the moment to just fill it out right there. But maybe not.

You’re familiar with what a parking ticket looks like; everybody is. It’s that same size and shape because once upon a time, it fit in that leather binder that officers would carry in their back pocket. 

It includes things like age, race, height, weight, maybe a clothing description, and  the important part, the factors that led to the stop. What gave the officer the reasonable suspicion they needed in order to legally effectuate that stop? It’s a lot of checkboxes. On the electronic version, it’s dropdowns. And then there’s a brief spot at the bottom for a freeform narrative.

How long does it take to fill out? A couple of minutes. The officers will also make an entry in their activity log, which again used to be a paper notebook and is now an electronic app on the phone, where they will enter in very similar information.

VC: Now bring it back to this law, if you could, and the wisdom of officers having to record details of every Level 1 and Level 2 stop.

TK: I think the law makes sense because the issues really happen in that first interaction. That is what the community is saying to police officers: that there’s something going on here in our initial interactions that we think needs to be captured, reviewed and analyzed. 

I’m a data person. I think as much data as you can collect and look at, it’ll help you discern what you should be focusing on and what you shouldn’t be focusing on. And I think that the community is saying that. These interactions are not just happening in ways that are not good for us and not good for law enforcement, but we’re not capturing all of it and we’re not able to look at what is really going on here.

The NYPD is data-rich. They have teams of folks who are super smart and who can analyze and help folks focus on where the issues are. And even with the Level 3s, you still have to discern how much of these really are true Level 3s versus not? For me, I’d rather capture more data and see if we can figure this out.

The poor officer is like, “Well, help me so I can go out and do the job that I’m supposed to do. And in addition to that, help me because I am getting beaten down in regards to what I should be doing and I’m not doing.”

VC: Does that speak to the reason for recording the Level 1s as well, or just the 2s and 3s?

TK: It’s really the 2s and 3s, but the 1s as well. Community members are saying, “In that initial interaction, I wasn’t clear if I was free to go; I wasn’t sure if I was under arrest.” Most people aren’t going to move when they see an officer in uniform and some will run because they’re fearful. It is the whole experience here that we’re talking about. We still have to wait and see what the Level 1s are going to tell us, and that is whether or not we can discern a Level 1 between Level 2s, between Level 3s.

VC: Ken, why doesn’t that analysis work for you?

KC: We’re actually not that far apart. I also like data. I like to see it, I like to use it to make things better. When you have officers who have been on the street for many years who still don’t understand this and can’t get it right, we need to train them differently. And we don’t do that. We don’t do the follow-up that we should. We don’t look at those body camera videos of the encounter and review it with the officer — not from a disciplinary perspective, but from a coaching, mentoring perspective — to say, “Hey, you didn’t have reasonable suspicion to make that stop. Why do you think you did? Walk me through what your thought process was so that I can help educate you and make you get it right next time.”

My concerns aren’t so much around the collection of the data, but around how the data ends up getting used. Was it Mark Twain that said, “There’s lies, damn lies and statistics”? A recent article said a top-line analysis of Level 3 stops shows that 90% of the people stopped by the police in New York City were young men of color. Okay, well, 94% of the shooting victims are as well. And without getting into why that is, just taking a statistic and comparing it to a percentage of the general population doesn’t always give you an accurate picture of what’s going on, or the rationale behind it.

Similarly, for the individual officers, what is that going to show? If I’m a detective and I work in a detective squad that handles a lot of shooting incidents, chances are I work in one of the 20 precincts in the city that account for 75% of the gun violence in the city. Overwhelmingly, the number of people I’m going to speak to on those Level 1 encounters are going to be people of color because those are the people who live in that neighborhood. Does that mean that I’m practicing biased policing? Probably not. But would somebody use the data to try to interpret it that way to advance their own agenda? Would that be a headline? I think so.

And then there’s the Civilian Complaint Review Board [the independent civilian investigative body overseeing complaints against NYPD]. Since the repeal of 50-a, the law shielding the release of police disciplinary records, the CCRB makes all allegations public regardless of outcome. And there is no appeal for that. Let’s say the CCRB substantiates an allegation of excessive force against me. I say, “I didn’t use excessive force,” so I opt for my right to have an administrative trial, and witnesses are called and evidence is presented. And at the end of it, I am found to have acted completely properly. If you run my CCRB profile, it will still show a substantiated allegation of excessive force. That is never removed.

When that data dump happened when 50-a was repealed, there were retired officers who lost their retirement jobs because people saw things like abuse in their CCRB profile. The CCRB puts everything into one of four buckets: it’s either force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, or offensive language. So abuse could mean a lot of things, but among the things it means is I didn’t offer you a business card after I stopped you and interacted with you. That’s considered abusive.

VC: The opponents of this law say it’s going to discourage cops from engaging in the kinds of interactions that are actually very important for community policing. On the other side is the claim that you’re actually going to be enhancing trust by putting all this data out and giving people a real sense of what’s happening.

TK: Actually, it’s both of those. It is providing transparency on the data and how it’s analyzed, and allowing others to analyze it as well. Not just NYPD, but numerous universities, folks in the community and more.

VC: Ken, do you think this is going to make it less likely that the average well-trained, well-intentioned police officer is  going to engage in the kinds of interactions that make for quality community policing?

KC: No, because I think that good cops always find a way to make it work. 

Listen, do I think it’s going to have an initial chilling effect on some engagement? Yes, absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. I also think that that will go away in a short period of time as long as the spirit of the law is upheld. Again, if I have that conversation, if I just happen to be walking down the street, Officer Corey’s out there walking his post, and I say, “Hey, good morning. How are you?” That’s not actually an investigative question because in New York, I don’t really care how you are. It’s just a greeting, right?

If I turn around and get disciplined for that because somebody makes a complaint and I didn’t do the paperwork — well, I didn’t think I had to do paperwork because I said, “Good morning. How are you?” to somebody on the street — that could be problematic. 

And I agree with everything Tracie said about trust and legitimacy. I think that that’s why the transparent, accurate portrayal of the data is so important, because if the leading headline is always that the Police Department is racist, then that actually harms trust and hampers legitimacy without a clear understanding of what the data is.

I think my bigger concern around engagement is always the unintended consequences. I was encouraging officers to address quality-of-life violations simply by correcting the condition, not driving for arrests, not driving for summonses. I want you to solve the problem in the lowest, simplest manner possible initially. If you can correct whatever that complaint is or whatever that condition is with a warning and a kind word, fantastic. I am the happiest guy in the world. 

I used to use this example: I’m walking through a subway car and I see somebody who’s outstretched on a seat. Okay, that’s a violation of the MTA rules. “Hey, good evening, sir. Just so you know, you can’t have your feet up on the seat. It’s a rule violation.” We have a brief conversation about how disappointed we were in the Mets season last year, and I resume my patrol through the train and the problem is corrected. Now, if on my return trip through the train the guy’s outstretched on the seat again, now maybe we’re escalating to a summons because the issue hasn’t been corrected. If I have to fill out paperwork regardless, then maybe I’ll just opt to fill out the paperwork instead of the summons instead of the stop form. 

VC: We’ve all had jobs at various levels where we’ve had different types of people looking over our work. But most managers also say they want to trust those beneath them, to let them exercise discretion as they do their jobs. If every interaction is recorded on a body cam and nearly every interaction has to be documented, are we at risk of effectively saying to police, “We don’t trust you to exercise discretion at all”? And is there a collateral consequence to that meta-message?

TK: Of course there is. But you mentioned the issue of trust, and that is one of the outputs of trust. If I don’t trust you, then I’m going to start asking for everything, so either I can begin to trust you or just say, “This is why I don’t trust you.” 

People in these communities have a long history of not being able to trust police. They’re asking for this so that it could hopefully increase trust. 

VC: Talk about this as a commander. You said, “We want you to be problem solvers, to exercise discretion.” How do you communicate that and also say, “You got to fill out a form for every interaction and you got to turn on your body cam before every interaction”? Are those concepts in tension?

KC: No, I don’t think they are. Trust is earned. That’s clear. And I’ve always been a big proponent of transparency for just that reason. I know that the majority of what goes on inside the Police Department is well-intentioned. Is it always perfect police work? No, absolutely not. We’re dealing with 32,000 human beings, and they’re going to make mistakes. It’s always been that way. If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear by this. Yeah, it’s moderately annoying, and then it goes away. It’s just part of the way that we do business. 

Where body cameras are concerned, I don’t think that there is a cop on patrol today who would patrol without a body camera. There was initial reluctance about it. They didn’t want it. “You want to see what I’m doing? They don’t trust us.” Today, they realize that it’s actually a much greater ally than it is a liability to them. And plenty of cops have told me that, “I would never go out on patrol without a body camera.”