NYPD Officers Take Griping About Paperwork To New Level As New Reporting Law Goes Into Effect
New York’s finest just don’t want to have to do the work that comes with being a cop. They’ve really never wanted to do it.
A new law requires officers to collect more data during more encounters with New York residents, which has kicked off a new wave of bitching from those who think they should be above the law, especially laws they don’t like.
The controversial new city law requiring NYPD cops to file reports on all low-level investigative stops with New Yorkers officially kicked off Monday — and rank-and-file officers weren’t happy.
“A huge pain in the ass,” one law enforcement source told The Post.
Well, that clears up the problem. It’s a huge pain in the ass, apparently. And even the mayor, Eric Adams, agrees with the cops. The law managed to pass despite his veto, but at least he’s being halfway gracious about it.
“We need our officers on patrol, not doing paperwork, but it’s the law, and we must follow the law,” Adams told 1010 WINS.
But is it really “controversial,” as the pro-cop New York Post puts it? And is it even really all that new?
What’s being asked of officers isn’t all that much more than they do now. The “reports” on low-level stops isn’t really a huge amount of additional reporting. It only asks officers to document the “aggregate number” of these stops per shift.
The next level of stops — where cops stop and question people or seek consent for a search — requires more in-depth reporting. Each one will have to be documented separately and contain demographic information on the people stopped.
The New York Post article leads with the complaints before delivering this paragraph, which suggests these low-level stops won’t trigger the law’s requirements for anything more specific than an approximate guess on total “level 1” stops per shift.
The internal order makes clear that cops don’t have to report on casual encounters with the public unless officers develop reasons to collect information or suspicion that a crime has been committed.
The thing is this is what’s been in place for years, ever since a federal judge found the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program to be a vehicle for routine rights violations more than a decade ago. The NYPD was ordered by Judge Shira Scheindlin to document these stops, including the demographic information of people stopped, since the program had mainly been used to harass minorities.
Three years later, not much had changed. Lots of violations of Judge Scheindlin’s order were discovered, the most prominent being the apparent utter refusal to properly document these stops. This new law simply codifies what’s been in place for more than decade, albeit in a way that makes it a bit more difficult for the rank-and-file to ignore.
On top of that, a law went into effect at the beginning of 2023 that required officers to document traffic stops (including stops of bicyclists) in a similar fashion. This was the direct result of officers deciding to move stop-and-frisk from the sidewalks to the roadways in hopes of avoiding the court-ordered paperwork.
The pattern is obvious. Laws and court orders demand more documentation. Cops whine about each iteration, either unwilling or unable to recognize that it is their own actions (or rather, inaction, in these cases) that generates legislation and court orders mandating additional reporting on stops. If they’d just gotten on top of it ten years ago, they might not have been the recipients of consecutive new laws crafted for the sole purpose of making them do their damn jobs properly.
Bitch away, coppers. But until you’re willing to do the job right, the rest of the government will just keep piling on the paperwork.