Law bars NYPD from warehousing stop-and-frisk database

Rejecting arguments by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly, Gov. David A. Paterson Friday signed into law a measure that bars the NYPD from warehousing personal information taken from individuals questioned by cops in the controversial stop-and-frisk program.

While Paterson didn't object to police questioning people believed to have committed or who may be about to commit a crime, he said the NYPD practice of keeping names and addresses of innocent people questioned during street encounters was contrary to society's notions of justice.

"Maybe that might work in Bosnia, maybe that might work in Somalia and maybe that would have worked in the Soviet Union or in '1984', " said Paterson, alluding to the George Orwell novel about a totalitarian society, "but we can't allow it to happen here."

In a sharply worded statement, Kelly said the law would strip the NYPD of an important crime-fighting weapon.

"Albany has robbed us of a great crime-fighting tool, one that saved lives. Without it, there will be, inevitably, killers and other criminals who won't be captured as quickly or perhaps ever," said Kelly.

City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria) said that while the database was a good police tool, he had written Kelly a year ago to persuade the NYPD to only keep information for a year as a compromise.

"If he had listened to [me] he wouldn't be in this situation right now," said Vallone, chair of the public safety committee. A police spokesman couldn't be reached for comment.

The law was pushed by state Sen. Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn) and Assemb. Hakeem Jeffries (D-Fort Greene), and other critics who believed police overwhelmingly targeted black and Hispanic people for special attention.

Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who called the new law a "civil rights landmark," noted that only 10 percent to 12 percent of people who were stopped received summonses or were arrested.

The police database has collected personal information about 3 million police stops, said Dunn. People who were approached by police with "at best ambiguous justifications," he said.

Adams told Newsday that the law doesn't require police to purge names and addresses already in the database but does bar the NYPD from collecting that information in the future. Information about ethnicity and sex of a person can be put in the database, he said.

Kelly has said that at a time when the NYPD is down about 6,000 officers from 2001, the stop-and-frisk program was an important way of augmenting police resources.

One high-ranked city law enforcement official who didn't want to be identified said the failure of Bloomberg and Kelly to defeat the law was an indication of Paterson's personal mindset on protecting civil liberties and not a political test of wills.