Twelve years after a federal court ruled the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional, the federal monitor says officers are still illegally stopping New Yorkers. In a blistering 2025 year-end review, the monitor flags unlawful self-initiated encounters, chronic underreporting of stops, and weak supervisory accountability that lets constitutional violations keep rolling on. The findings land just as the city argues over whether new oversight tools and plainclothes teams are actually fixing the problem or just dressing it up.
Monitor files scathing year-end update
In a letter filed Feb. 17 with U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres, court-appointed monitor Mylan Denerstein warned that the NYPD “has yet to reach substantial compliance” with the court’s 2013 order and singled out three recurring failures: unlawful self-initiated stops, underreporting of encounters, and a lack of meaningful accountability among supervisors and commanders. Denerstein wrote that retraining alone has not worked and urged the department to lean on corrective tools such as ComplianceStat and the Early Intervention Program. Those conclusions are laid out in the latest report from the NYPD Monitor.
Audit numbers: how often stops were found unlawful
The Monitor’s audits highlight a sharp gap between what NYPD supervisors sign off on and what the independent review finds. In the first half of 2025, roughly 11% of stops were unconstitutional, even though reviewing supervisors had called almost all of those same encounters lawful. On paper, supervisors deemed 99% of stops lawful, while the Monitor’s audits found only 89% lawful.
The report also notes that self-initiated encounters were far more likely to break the rules, with compliance rates of about 79.4% for stops, 64% for frisks, and 53.3% for searches, and that nearly one-third of encounters were not properly documented at all. “There is no excuse for the continued failures year after year,” Denerstein wrote in the filing. The data and audits behind those findings are detailed by the NYPD Monitor.
Specialized teams drive the problem
According to the monitor, some of the worst performance comes from the NYPD’s specialized units. Neighborhood Safety Teams logged stops that were lawful only about 75% of the time, and Public Safety Teams came in around 64%, with even lower rates for frisks and searches. Those special teams also carry out a disproportionate share of self-initiated stops, which are the encounters most likely to be unconstitutional, a pattern reported by The City.
Counting the stops
Stop totals are moving in the wrong direction if the goal is fewer questionable encounters. Officers recorded 25,386 stops in 2024, a roughly 50% jump from 2023, and nearly nine in ten people stopped were Black or Latino. That combination underscores the racial stakes of the audits. The surge, along with a shift toward more self-initiated contacts, helps explain why the monitor warns that underreporting and weak supervision make it harder to detect unconstitutional policing, according to New York Focus.
City and NYPD respond
The mayor’s office said it takes the monitor’s findings seriously and is committed to making sure NYPD practices meet constitutional standards. The NYPD told reporters it is “committed to upholding the constitutional rights of everyone we encounter, no matter the circumstance,” while police unions pushed back and called the scrutiny demoralizing to officers, as reported by amNY.
Legal implications
The report was filed under the long-running Floyd oversight and warned that the department is unlikely to meet court-ordered compliance targets for specialized units, including deadlines the monitor set for higher compliance. Those deadlines, and the monitor’s stated willingness to go back to court if targets are not met, come against a backdrop of findings that the NYPD has often imposed lenient discipline for illegal stops, a pattern detailed in an independent review noted by AP…