Vital City, a quarterly publication, takes a look at New York’s latest law, the How Many Stops Act, through an interview with two former NYPD leaders, including CPE Co-Founder, President, and COO Dr. Tracie L. Keesee. The law will require police officers to document specific information for all stops they make, including demographic information, the reason for the stop, and whether force was used. An excerpt from the conversation:
[Vital City]: Now bring it back to this law, if you could, and the wisdom of officers having to record details of every Level 1 and Level 2 stop.
[Dr. Tracie L. Keesee]: I think the law makes sense because the issues really happen in that first interaction. That is what the community is saying to police officers: that there’s something going on here in our initial interactions that we think needs to be captured, reviewed and analyzed.
I’m a data person. I think as much data as you can collect and look at, it’ll help you discern what you should be focusing on and what you shouldn’t be focusing on. And I think that the community is saying that. These interactions are not just happening in ways that are not good for us and not good for law enforcement, but we’re not capturing all of it and we’re not able to look at what is really going on here.
“It is estimated that 7 to 10 percent of all police encounters involve a person who has a mental illness. Most of these encounters do not involve any violence, and some don’t involve a crime at all,” according to information released by the organization. “People with mental illness are no more likely than anyone else to act violently. Despite this, police arrest, injure and kill people with mental illness at higher rates than people without mental illness.”
Read the full Vital City interview on their website.