By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Nearly one third of all stops made by the New York City Police Department over the past six years were illegal or of questionable legality, with race playing a major factor in who gets stopped, a study released Tuesday claims.
The report, released by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), analyzed six years of the NYPD's own data and found that nearly 150,000 stops were made without any reported justification.
An additional 544,252 stops were made without providing sufficient information to determine whether they were justified, according to the report.
Columbia Professor Jeffrey Fagan prepared the report for CCR, a non-profit organization that is currently suing the NYPD on behalf of people who believe they were stopped without proper cause.
The report found that black and Hispanic citizens were more likely to be stopped than whites and Asians, even after the data was adjusted for the racial composition of suspects and crime rate for the area.
"This exhaustive and meticulously researched report makes clear what hundreds of thousands of young Black and Latino people know from their everyday lives," CCR attorney Darius Charney said in a statement following the report's release. "[T]he NYPD stops and frisks them because of their race."
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly reportedly cast doubt on the objectivity of the study, teliing the New York Times, "I think you have to understand this was an advocacy paper."
"We haven't had a chance to look at it," Kelly told the Times. "but I wouldn't take the position that this is an objective document."
