Justice · Police Transparency

2.7 Million Police Encounters in One Year: What the NYPD’s How Many Stops Act Data Reveals, and Why No Other City Has It

For decades, most of what New York police officers did on the street went uncounted. A 2024 transparency law changed that. The first full year of numbers describes a department that makes more than 7,000 documented contacts a day, and a public that experiences them very differently depending on who they are.

You can’t fix what nobody counts.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, New York City police officers documented about 2.7 million investigative encounters with civilians, more than 7,000 a day. Almost none of that activity would have been visible before. The count exists because of the How Many Stops Act, a City Council law that took effect in July 2024 and requires the NYPD to record demographic and situational details about the lower level street interactions that officers had long handled without a paper trail. The first year of the data, analyzed by researchers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute and others, gives the public a rare picture of everyday policing at scale.

How the Law Came About

The How Many Stops Act, introduced in the Council as Intro 586-A, passed in December 2023 by a veto proof majority. The mayor at the time, Eric Adams, vetoed it, and on January 30, 2024 the Council overrode the veto by a vote of 42 to 9. Supporters called it a basic transparency measure. Critics, including the mayor who vetoed it, argued that documentation would add paperwork and slow officers down. The law has since been implemented, and the data it produces has become one of the most closely read police datasets in the country.

What it does is simple. Under New York’s long standing framework, police encounters fall into levels. Level 1 is a request for information, a question or a brief approach without any restraint on the person. Level 2 is a more pointed inquiry, justified by a founded suspicion that criminal activity may be afoot. Level 3 is the stop and frisk style encounter, supported by reasonable suspicion, in which a person is not free to leave. Level 3 stops had been recorded for years, but Levels 1 and 2 had mostly gone unreported. Officers now use a smartphone based dropdown form to log the person’s perceived age, race and gender, the reason for the encounter, how it started, whether it escalated to a higher level, and whether force was used. Casual conversations are excluded, and the bill allows a single entry for large groups of interactions.

Seven thousand documented encounters a day. Before the law, most of them left no record at all.

What the First Year Shows

The sheer scale of Level 1 contact stands out. The Thurgood Marshall Institute found that Level 1 encounters made up nearly 98 percent of the total, more than 2.6 million contacts, while Level 3 stops accounted for about 1 percent. Level 1 encounters outnumbered Level 3 stops 96 to 1. In practice, the police activity the public used to see in the stop and frisk statistics was only the visible tip of a much larger volume of street contact. Most of those interactions were brief and conducted without suspicion of a crime, which is why they escaped scrutiny for so long.

Who initiated each encounter varied sharply by level. Officers started 91 percent of Level 2 encounters and 51 percent of Level 3 stops, but only 20 percent of Level 1 encounters, so most of the lowest level contacts began in some way other than an officer’s own initiative. Use of force was recorded in 1.6 percent of all encounters, a small share but, at this volume, nearly 43,000 incidents a year.

Who Is Being Approached

The racial pattern is the finding that has drawn the most attention. Black New Yorkers had higher encounter rates than non-Hispanic white New Yorkers at every level. Measured against population share, Black residents were nearly three times as likely to be approached in a Level 1 encounter, nearly 18 times as likely in a Level 2 encounter, and 11 times as likely in a Level 3 stop. The analysis also found that precincts with larger Black populations had higher overall encounter rates, with each 10 point increase in a precinct’s Black population associated with a roughly 5 percent increase in its encounter rate. And in precincts with more white residents, the gap between Black and white encounter rates was wider, meaning the disparity was sharpest in whiter parts of the city.

Researchers are careful to note what these figures can and cannot show. They describe who is approached, not why, and rates measured against residential population do not account for who is actually present on the street at a given hour, or for differences in local crime. The police department and its defenders make exactly this point, arguing that deployment follows reports of crime and community requests. Advocates counter that the size and consistency of the disparities, across every level and across the city, are difficult to explain by crime patterns alone. A city monitor’s review of the department’s practices found that officer initiated stops were lawful about 79 percent of the time in the first three quarters of 2024, compared with 93 percent for stops made after a radio call and 96 percent for those based on a complainant’s report.

The Limits of the Numbers

The dataset is a start, not a verdict. Court monitors have found that officers documented only 59 percent of Level 3 stops in 2023, before the law took effect, and body camera reviews have indicated that encounters are sometimes underreported or placed in the wrong category. The Public Advocate’s office has cited monitor findings that as many as a quarter of stops are unconstitutional, a claim that comes from an advocacy source and reflects that office’s position. Any dataset built on officer self reporting inherits the weaknesses of self reporting, and the researchers who studied the New York numbers recommend independent oversight, through an investigations department or an oversight commission, to verify that the logging is consistent and complete.

Is There a National Equivalent?

No. The United States has roughly 18,000 state, county and local law enforcement agencies, and there is no single, real time database of low level police interactions. What exists is a patchwork of periodic federal surveys and independent research projects. Unless a state or city passes its own requirement, as California did with its Racial and Identity Profiling Act and New York City did with this law, most everyday encounters never get aggregated into a national picture.

The main federal benchmark is the Police-Public Contact Survey, run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Instead of collecting police logs, it asks a national sample of residents about their experiences. The 2022 edition, analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative, found almost 50 million people reporting police contact, the fewest since 2008, and 16.2 million traffic stops, down by a third from more than 24 million in 2018. Black drivers stopped by police were searched or arrested 9 percent of the time, compared with 4 percent of Hispanic drivers and 3 percent of white drivers. In the most recent contact, Black respondents were more than three times as likely as white respondents to experience a threat or use of nonfatal force, and they accounted for 12 percent of police initiated or traffic accident contacts but 32 percent of the cases involving force. The survey excludes fatal force and doesn’t capture why a contact began, and the analysis notes that its disparities are not adjusted for local crime rates.

The second major source is the Stanford Open Policing Project, which has collected and standardized more than 200 million traffic stop and search records, with nearly 100 million stops from 21 state patrol agencies and 29 municipal departments detailed enough for rigorous statistical work. Its findings point in a consistent direction. Black drivers are generally stopped at higher rates than white drivers, and in nearly every jurisdiction, Black and Hispanic drivers are searched more often. The researchers’ threshold test suggests police require less suspicion to search Black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers, though they caution that such tests cannot rule out every non-discriminatory explanation. After marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington, search rates fell sharply, but the racial gaps in searches persisted.

What Comes Next

• December 2023The City Council passes the How Many Stops Act with a veto proof majority.
• January 30, 2024The Council overrides the mayor’s veto, 42 to 9.
• July 2024The law takes effect and officers begin logging Level 1 and 2 encounters.
• July 2024 to June 2025The first full year of data records about 2.7 million encounters.
• 2026Researchers continue to report persistent racial disparities as additional data is released.

The deeper significance of the New York dataset may be its example. It shows that a large police department can be required to count its everyday contact with the public, that the count can be done with a phone app and a dropdown menu, and that doing so produces information the public had never seen. Whether other cities follow, and whether the data leads to changes in how officers approach people, will decide if the law is remembered as a milestone in police transparency or as a very large spreadsheet. For now, it has established one thing beyond argument. The scale of routine police contact is far greater than the public ever knew, and the burden of it falls unevenly.