NYPD Will Start Issuing Stop-and-Frisk 'Receipts' This Fall

A Manhattan judge has ordered NYPD officers to start handing out an “explanatory receipt“ to anybody stopped by police but not arrested, a spokesperson for the department told Patch.

Officers will reportedly begin issuing the stop-and-frisk receipts in less than a month, on Sept. 21.

The receipt will include a section for the officer to scribble down his or her reasons for stopping/frisking, as well as contact info for the Civilian Complaint Review Board (the CCRB, an external watchdog) and the NYPD’s own Internal Affairs Bureau.

“Stop and frisks are not allowed unless they are based on articulable factors that can be written down,” Richard Emory, head of the CCRB, said in an interview on WNYC radio.

Emory said the receipts ”require the officer to articulate objectively the reasons that the stop was done... and to be much more respectful and much more proper about the way he or she goes about the stop, question and frisk.”

The city’s police union — called the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) — is, predictably, not quite as pumped on the concept.

In a statement issued Tuesday in response to the pro-receipt court ruling, PBA president Patrick Lynch said that “prominently” listing contact info for the CCRB on the receipt is basically an invite for ”retaliatory complaints against police officers who make an active effort to prevent crime and take guns off the street.”

“They are just one more item on the ever-growing list of anti-public-safety measures that will put an end to proactive policing in this city and ultimately accelerate the increase in crime and disorder that we are already seeing in our public spaces,” Lynch said. “It is time for our policymakers to stop heaping new burdens on police officers and to figure out how unwind the damaging measures that are already in place before the erosion in public safety does serious damage to NYC’s economic health.”

New Yorkers interviewed by Pix11 seemed pretty creeped out by the idea. (See video, below.)

Where do you stand? Will you be asking for your receipt next time you’re subjected to a police pat-down?