By Michele Evans / NYweeklyRecord.com / Date: 10/7/2026
Category: NYPD / Criminal Justice / Police Accountability / Civil Rights
NEW YORK CITY, NY –
A federal court monitor says the New York Police Department failed to document an estimated 5,524 street stops in 2025, leaving thousands of police encounters outside the official record used to test whether officers are following constitutional rules.
The finding appears in a corrected report filed October 6 in the long-running Floyd stop-and-frisk litigation. The monitor estimated that NYPD officers properly documented 82.4 percent of Terry stops citywide last year. That means 17.6 percent, close to one in five, were not properly reported.
The correction matters. An earlier version released September 28 produced a much higher estimate. The corrected report uses a reweighted method designed to reflect the actual mix of body-camera labels across the city. The new calculation lowers the citywide estimate, but it does not erase the underlying failure.
The monitor’s unweighted audit sample found reports for 74 percent of confirmed stops and no report for 26 percent. Because the sample deliberately included fixed numbers of videos from different encounter categories, those percentages describe the sample, not the city as a whole. The corrected report says the reweighted estimate is the proper citywide measure.
A Terry stop is more than a casual police encounter. It occurs when an officer detains a person who is not free to leave. The officer must have reasonable suspicion that the person committed, is committing or is about to commit a felony or Penal Law misdemeanor. NYPD rules require a stop report.
That paperwork is not clerical debris. It records why the stop happened, what officers did and whether the encounter can be reviewed later. When a stop disappears from the database, supervisors, lawyers, courts and the public lose a critical piece of the accountability trail.
The monitor found the sharpest breakdown when officers labeled a stop as a lower-level encounter. In 2025, only 17.9 percent of confirmed Terry stops mislabeled as Level 2 encounters had a stop report. By contrast, all 88 confirmed stops that officers correctly labeled Level 3 in the audit sample had reports on file.
That gap gives the labeling decision real consequences. A Level 2 encounter requires only a founded suspicion that criminality may be present and does not require a traditional stop report. A Level 3 Terry stop requires reasonable suspicion and must be documented. Mislabel the encounter, and the formal record can vanish.
The monitor estimated that roughly 33,141 body-camera videos were not properly labeled as Level 3 stops in 2025. Because several officers often record the same encounter, the monitor divided the video estimate by an average of six officers per stop, producing the estimate of 5,524 undocumented stops.
The report also warns that the count cannot capture stops when officers failed to activate their body cameras. There is no practical method for the monitor to measure encounters that were never recorded.
The corrected trend line shows improvement, but not compliance. The reweighted reporting rate rose from an estimated 60 percent in 2022 to 72 percent in 2023 and 82 percent in both 2024 and 2025. The monitor still called underreporting a persistent and significant problem more than a decade after the federal court’s 2013 remedial order.
Accountability remains the unanswered question. The monitor wrote that officers who misclassified stops and failed to prepare reports have rarely been disciplined. Supervisors and command executives also have not been held accountable for their officers’ failures.
The NYPD has acknowledged the problem and is developing an audit protocol and a uniform discipline system for unreported stops, according to the monitor. Those plans have not yet been tested against the scale of the failure documented in the report.
For New Yorkers stopped on the street, the stakes are immediate. A missing report can make it harder to challenge an unlawful detention, identify patterns of misconduct or prove that constitutional safeguards are being ignored. The corrected math is narrower. The accountability gap is still wide.
Leave a Reply