Monitor Finds NYPD Failed to Document Nearly 10,000 Stops in 2025, Findings Reveal NYPD Continues to Flout Court Oversight

Read a PDF of our statement here.

(NEW YORK, NY) - The Legal Aid Society and the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) today condemned the New York City Police Department (NYPD) following the release of a new report from the Independent Monitor finding that officers failed to properly document almost 10,000 Terry stops in 2025, meaning that the NYPD failed to report more than a quarter of all such stops citywide. Terry stops allow officers to briefly detain an individual based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. The Monitor estimates that the NYPD failed to document approximately 27 percent of Terry stops in 2025, with a citywide reporting compliance rate of just 73 percent.

Among the Monitor's key findings:

• Underreporting has persisted for years, flouting the Court's mandate that the NYPD accurately document every Terry stop. The Monitor estimates citywide reporting compliance of just 36 percent in 2022, 45 percent in 2023, 69 percent in 2024, and 73 percent in 2025 - suggesting that the NYPD failed to document somewhere between roughly one-quarter and nearly two-thirds of all Terry stops during those years. Even though underreporting rates appeared to decrease in 2025 compared to prior years, the Monitor noted that any such improvement is too small to be statistically meaningful, and that overall compliance with the requirement that NYPD document every Terry stop is low.

• Officers frequently misclassified Terry stops as lower-level encounters, and the majority of those mislabeled stops went unreported. From 2022-2025, only 17 to 21 percent of confirmed Terry stops that were mislabeled as Level 2 stops were properly documented. By contrast, approximately 98 percent of stops officers labeled as Level 3 Terry stops had reports on file between 2022 and 2025.

• Tens of thousands of body-worn camera videos may have been mislabeled. The Monitor estimates that approximately 58,000 videos in 2025 were not properly labeled as Level 3 Terry stops. Because multiple officers typically record the same encounter, the Monitor estimates those videos represent approximately 9,641 undocumented stops.
• The scale of this problem may be even greater. The Monitor identified a significant decline in body-worn camera videos categorized as Investigative Encounters, from approximately 1.23 million in the first quarter of 2024 to 492,099 in the fourth quarter of 2025, alongside an increase in encounters labeled "Non-Crime Corrected," which officers are generally not required to document. The Monitor warned that if even a small percentage of those videos contain Terry stops, the number of undocumented stops could increase significantly.

This persistent failure demands immediate action from City Hall. The Mayor has not yet fulfilled the promises on policing reforms he made to New Yorkers.

"The NYPD's failure to accurately record Terry stops renders it impossible for the Monitor to assess the NYPD's compliance with the Constitution and the Court's mandates," said Charles McLaurin, Legal Defense Fund Senior Counsel. "The NYPD has the training and tools to record Terry stops properly. It must hold officers and supervisors accountable for failing to record Terry stops as required by the Court's remedial order. This is a crisis that requires urgent intervention. NYPD must comply with the Court mandates so that the Monitor can assess the lawfulness of the NYPD's stop and frisk practices."

"This report exposes a fundamental accountability failure at the NYPD: Thousands of New Yorkers are being stopped by police without those encounters ever making it into the official record," said Karina Tefft, Staff Attorney in the Special Litigation Unit at The Legal Aid Society. "When officers fail to document stops, they shield their conduct from the very oversight mechanisms designed to identify unconstitutional policing and hold officers accountable. More than a decade of federal monitoring should have put an end to this practice, yet the NYPD continues to operate without the transparency and accountability New Yorkers deserve. Mayor Mamdani campaigned on a different vision for public safety, but seven months into his Administration, he has continued too many of the failed policing practices he inherited. New Yorkers need more than promises of reform. City Hall must act now to end these practices, strengthen accountability, and ensure that the NYPD complies with the Constitution."

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The Legal Aid Society is a nonprofit law firm that exists for one simple yet powerful reason: to ensure that New Yorkers are not denied their right to equal justice because of poverty. For 150 years, we have protected, defended, and advocated for those who have struggled in silence for far too long. Every day, in every borough, The Legal Aid Society changes the lives of the people we serve and helps improve our communities. www.legalaidnyc.org

Founded in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the nation's first civil rights legal organization. LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957, though it was founded under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall while he was at the NAACP. LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) is a division of LDF that undertakes innovative research and houses LDF's archive. In all media attributions, please refer to us as the Legal Defense Fund or LDF (do not include NAACP) and refer to the Institute as LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute or TMI.