More than a decade ago, a federal court ruled that New York City police had unconstitutionally stopped and harassed black and Hispanic residents. The ruling lays out necessary changes, including some very basic ones, saying the NYPD will review whether the officer’s stop was legal.
But for most of the past three years, the nation’s largest police department has been unable to do so against many officers in one aggressive, politically connected unit trying to stop New Yorkers from doing so.
The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and exposed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, who oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.
In total, more than 2,000 stops were not properly screened, according to the monitor’s data.
The Community Response Team (CRT) was involved in this outage. A ProPublica investigation last year found the force often evaded oversight in pursuing so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorcycles and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and opaque operations upset some NYPD officials, but the force expanded significantly with support from then-Mayor Eric Adams.
The lack of review is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to meet its obligations under a longstanding court order. For example, officers across departments often do not document outages.
The importance of review is especially important for an aggressive team like CRT, which has a track record of unconstitutional suspensions. It has also received hundreds of complaints from the private sector since its creation three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team were found by a civilian complaint review board to have engaged in misconduct at least once during their careers, according to a ProPublica analysis of commission data last year. Compared to this, they represent only a fraction of the total NYPD police force.
Prior to the latest findings, federal watchdogs had issued warnings about the force’s actions. Last year’s report found that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were legal, a rate far worse than the NYPD’s patrol force. Nearly every stop involved a black or Hispanic resident.
The federal monitor said in a letter to the court that the newly discovered flaws mean the monitor’s own numbers on CRT televisions’ constitutional compliance are likely wrong. The actual rate is “likely lower” than reported, the monitors wrote.
Court-appointed monitor Mylan Dennerstein slammed the NYPD and its failure to review the suspension.
“Failure to audit these stops means unconstitutional stops, frisks, and searches were not detected,” Dennerstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “This is unacceptable. The city needs to take further steps to prevent this from happening.”
In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it had moved to resolve the issue. “Under Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch, the NYPD has taken significant additional steps to increase oversight and accountability. The Oversight Bureau and the NYPD identified this error, and the NYPD is working with the Oversight Bureau to address it.”
During the first two-and-a-half years after the force was established in 2023, the failure to properly review outages affected only a portion of the force led by senior leadership.
But the problem escalated last fall when the New York Police Department reorganized the CRT, placing officers across the city under central command. The move was aimed at increasing oversight of the team, which now has a new commander. But in the process, stops for the entire force, which had grown to about 180 officers, were not audited.
One of the unit’s former commanders, John Chell, defended that record.
“This team really changed things,” said Chell, who stepped down as the department’s top uniform officer last year. “Did we make a mistake? Of course. But we stabilized the city. We did our job.”
But lawmakers and civil rights activists have long criticized CRT’s heavy-handed enforcement and said recent reporting failures underscore the need to disband the unit.
“Community task forces operated with too little oversight and caused too much damage,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who recalls being unfairly stopped and whipped by the NYPD more than a decade ago. “A unit with this record should not continue.”
Lawyers for the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the original litigants in the stop-and-frisk case, also called for the tube shutters to be closed.
“These forces have a long history of harsh policing of people of color. There is no basis for it,” said Daniel Lambright, the group’s director of criminal justice litigation. “They must go because they do more harm than good.”
Mayor Zoran Mamdani, who took office in January and pledged during his campaign to reimagine public safety, has backed the closure of another organization that has come under scrutiny for its heavy-handed approach to protests, but his office has refused to address growing calls to disband CRT.
“We are aware of the issues raised regarding the Community Response Team and the steps the NYPD has taken to address them,” a spokesperson for the mayor said in a statement to ProPublica. “The Mamdani Administration is committed to improving public safety in a way that meets the needs and values of New Yorkers.”
When launched three years ago, CRT focused on changing Adams priorities, including cracking down on illegal bikes. Rather than waiting for calls, the unit actively roamed the city looking for crimes, a technique once used by one of the NYPD’s most notorious units.
CRT quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Just a few months after the unit was launched, an officer in an unmarked patrol car spotted a man on a dirt bike, crossed the yellow line and into oncoming traffic, and struck the biker head-on, sending him flying. The man later died from his injuries. The New York City Police Department announced that the officer had been placed on administrative leave for 13 days.
Department leaders told ProPublica they had trouble overseeing the unit’s work because it was essentially created by the book, ultimately leading to the cancellation of the stop review. Officers who are part of a unit are often not formally assigned to a unit, meaning their actions are not properly tracked.
“That team was one of those teams where everyone was a ghost,” one former department official told ProPublica last year.
That approach has also been extended to stop-and-frisk.
When wardens learned about the cathode ray tubes in the unit’s early days, the New York City Police Department assured them they would not be stopped multiple times. It was only later that they discovered the team was engaging in such behavior “frequently,” the watchdog said in a report last year.
In 2025, CRTs recorded 1,400 stop-and-frisks, according to Monitor and NYPD data. More than 900 cases were not properly reviewed.
