Stop and frisk, there's an app for that

To the ever-expanding world of apps, which can flip a virtual coin, send alerts about riptides or find a parking space, add one for the NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices.

The New York Civil Liberties Union, long an opponent of police practices it says have targeted minorities, Wednesday unveiled a bilingual smartphone application that will allow New Yorkers to record and monitor what police do in street encounters. The recording can then be sent to the civil rights organization for further analysis and action.

"Stop and Frisk Watch is about empowering individuals and community groups to confront abusive and discriminatory policing," NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman said, in announcing the Android app in a news conference outside police headquarters in lower Manhattan.

The app is available in English and Spanish and will allow people who witness police encounters to "go beyond the [police] data to document how each unjustified stop further corrodes trust between communities and law enforcement," Lieberman said. The app would allow people who record encounters to send videos to the NYCLU.

But an NYPD spokesman pointed out a number of concerns with the new app, including privacy.

"Criminals would find the app useful considering the NYLCU's stated intention of alerting subscribers to where police stops are happening," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "In addition to safety issues, the privacy issues are legion. Ironically, the NYCLU is compiling a database of videos of individuals stopped by police. It may be troubling to some that the NYCLU is collecting personal identifying information in the process."

Development of the app, done in conjunction with Brooklyn visual artist Jason Van Anden, who devised a similar one for the Occupy Wall Street movement, comes at a time when political controversy over police stop and frisk activity is rising. Police statistics show that cops stopped and interrogated people in 685,000 instances last year, up some 600 percent since the beginning of the Bloomberg administration.

Critics say the practice amounts to racial and ethnic profiling but police contend it has helped to drive down crime, particularly homicides in minority neighborhoods.