The New York Times-20080125-City Releases Police Data To Crime Research Group
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City Releases Police Data To Crime Research Group
The New York Police Department has turned over an electronic database on more than 500,000 street stops made by officers in 2006 to analysts at a national crime data archive in Michigan, officials from the City Law Department said on Thursday. The intent, officials said, is that the data will be released in some fashion to researchers and the public.
The release of the data was criticized by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which sued for access to the data in State Supreme Court in Manhattan in November. The group wants to perform its own analysis of the data to determine whether race played a role in the street stops. The New York Times, the New York City Bar Association and 21 scholars from around the country have filed briefs in support of the suit. The case is pending.
It is disturbing that the N.Y.P.D. will give the data to anyone outside of our city who asks for it, but will fight tooth and nail to keep the information from New Yorkers, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the civil liberties group, said on Thursday. New Yorkers have a right to know if the police are stopping people on racially biased grounds.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has said that his officers do not practice racial profiling in making the stops. The department, while denying requests by the City Council to turn over the data, gave it to the RAND Corporation, a private nonprofit organization, for an outside analysis.
The results of the RAND analysis, commissioned by the department through the Police Foundation, were released in November and found small racial differences in the rates of frisk, search, use of force and arrest.
The same data provided to RAND is now being analyzed by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, an organization based at the University of Michigan and financed by the Department of Justice to format and distribute crime data to academic researchers.
The archive will vet the format and content of the database transmittal and, when appropriate, make the data available to the research community, said Jesse Levine, a senior counsel in the general litigation division of the Law Department. He said that the archive will not censor the police data, and that it will aid, not inhibit, researchers.
But it was unclear when the data would make its way to the public, and in what form. Christopher D. Maxwell, a criminologist and the director of the archive, said that the New York police data was received on Jan. 17, and that the archive had made it the top priority among its more than 100 research projects. He said that he hoped the initial release of the data would be made by late February, but he set no deadline.
Mr. Maxwell said some sections of data it received included descriptive material that contained the names of people who had been stopped, something that both the police and the civil liberties group have said should not be made public. Because of the amount of work required, Mr. Maxwell said, the archive will initially withhold the descriptions, rather than attempt to redact the names.
David E. McCraw, a lawyer for The Times, said its intention was to obtain the data to do our own analysis. He added, They are telling us so little about what the data from Michigan will look like that, at the end of the day, having the ability to do our own analysis is what this suit is all about.
Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the civil liberties group, said its lawsuit is not moot until we get the data we are pursuing.
