By Gabriela Resto-Montero
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Police have stopped and frisked more than 130,000 people in the third quarter of 2009, a 15 percent jump from the same period 2008, according to a report released by NYPD.
Over the quarter, police stopped and interrogated 137,894 people, 93 percent of whom were men, and 58 percent were black.
Hispanic men made up 31 percent of those who were stopped and frisked, and white men were stopped just 9 percent of the time, according to the report.
Under the Stop and Frisk program, officers can stop, question and pat-down people they deem suspicious.
Police also keep information about the people they frisk in a database.
While the NYPD says Stop and Frisk keeps illegal weapons off the street, the New York Civil Liberties Union calls the practice an ineffective and abusive practice.
“A practice that wastes an officer’s valuable time with a 90 percent fail rate – while at the same time humiliating hundreds of thousands of black and brown New Yorkers – is not a wise or effective policing technique,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
“It is not a crime to walk down the street in New York City, yet every day innocent black and brown New Yorkers are turned into suspects for doing just that.”
The group also wants the NYPD to dump the database. The NYPD says the information gathered in it is valuable to investigations.
Last year, the police confiscated 6,970 illegal weapons as a part of the program including mostly knives but also 747 pistols, 84 assault weapons and rifles and 9 machine guns, the report said. The report doesn't say how many weapons were confiscated this year.
Police stopped 171,094 people in the first quarter of this year, an 18 percent jump from last year, and in the second quarter, they stopped 140,552 people. In 2008, the total number of stop and frisks reached 531,159. According to the ACLU, the NYPD is on pace to stop and frisk more than 610,000
