Today, the Independent Monitor of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released a report detailing an incriminating preliminary audit of the NYPD’s Neighborhood Safety Teams (NST).

NST units deploy hundreds of officers across the five boroughs to patrol neighborhoods and make arrests in unmarked vehicles. The controversial unit relaunched in March 2022 as a rebranded version of the “Anti-Crime Unit,” which received a staggering number of complaints on its dangerous practices over the years and was disbanded in August 2020 following racial justice protests.

The Independent Monitor’s report identifies evidence of harmful and discriminatory practices within the units, including the fact that more than 97% of the people stopped by NST officers were Black or Hispanic and that NST officers appear to be making unlawful stops at a rate that is nine percentage points higher than the Department-wide compliance rate in 2020.

The report also found that supervisors are not identifying and correcting improper stops, frisks, and searches, and oversight by the precinct command and the Department is similarly lacking.

“Our clients and all New Yorkers deserve to live their lives without the fear of being targeted by the hyper-aggressive policing tactics that the Neighborhood Safety Teams are quickly becoming known for,” said Molly Griffard, an attorney in the Criminal Defense Practice’s Law Reform and Special Litigation Unit at The Legal Aid Society.

“Today’s report by the NYPD Monitor suggests that these new units are off to a troubling start with high rates of police misconduct and constitutional violations,” they continued. “These early audit results confirm what Legal Aid and other advocates feared when Mayor Adams created the units just over one year ago — that Neighborhood Safety Teams are, like their Anti-Crime and Street Crime Unit predecessors, rife with misconduct and prone to abuse the rights of the very people they are tasked with protecting.”