Federal Monitoring At The Public Trough
Thirteen years. Thirty-three reports. And the NYPD is still underreporting Terry stops.
The September 28, 2026 Thirty-Third Report of the Independent Monitor: Report on Underreporting should force a serious examination of what more than a decade of federal monitoring has actually accomplished.
The monitorship arose from the stop-and-frisk litigation in Floyd v. City of New York, Ligon v. City of New York, and Davis v. City of New York. The remedial order requires every Terry stop to be documented. Yet the Monitor now estimates that almost 10,000 Terry stops were not properly reported in 2025 alone—approximately 27% of all stops. In other words, more than one in four constitutionally significant police encounters may be missing from the formal stop-reporting system.
That is not a paperwork problem.
When a Terry stop is mislabeled or never documented, it can escape review by the officer’s first-line supervisor, command self-inspections, the NYPD Quality Assurance Section, the Monitor, and the federal court itself. The Monitor expressly warns that undocumented stops can allow constitutional violations to go undetected.
And after thirteen years, the Monitor still describes underreporting as a “persistent, unresolved problem” and concludes that the NYPD’s existing accountability mechanisms are insufficient.
So what exactly is the measure of success here?
How many more reports, audits, compliance reviews, corrective plans, consultants, lawyers, meetings, and years of federal supervision are required before somebody asks whether the monitoring apparatus itself is producing measurable institutional correction?
The Monitor says NYPD needs yet another plan to improve reporting. Fine. But thirty-three reports into this experiment, taxpayers and the public are entitled to something more than another plan.
They are entitled to results.
If federal oversight cannot ensure that NYPD officers accurately document one of the most basic and constitutionally significant encounters they conduct on the street, then the public should be asking what this monitorship has accomplished, what it has cost, why these failures persist, and what objective benchmark will ever bring the process to an end.
Oversight without measurable institutional correction is not reform.
It is an industry.
Read the thought-piece:
buff.ly/wIOHzSt
#NYPD #TerryStops #StopAndFrisk #CivilRights #PoliceAccountability #FederalMonitor #ConstitutionalPolicing #PoliceReform #NYC #FloydVNYC #LigonVNYC #DavisVNYC #PublicAccountability #TheSandersFirmPC