A FEW BLOCKS, 4 YEARS, 52,000 POLICE STOPS

When night falls, police officers blanket some eight odd blocks of
Brownsville, Brooklyn. Squad cars with flashing lights cruise along
the main avenues: Livonia to Powell to Sutter to Rockaway. And again.

On the inner streets, dozens of officers, many fresh out of the police
academy, walk in pairs or linger on corners. Others, deeper within the
urban grid, navigate a maze of public housing complexes, patrolling
the stairwells and hallways.

This small army of officers, night after night, spends much of its
energy pursuing the controversial Police Department tactic known as
"Stop, Question, Frisk," and it does so at a rate unmatched anywhere
else in the city.

The officers stop people they think might be carrying guns; they stop
and question people who merely enter the public housing project
buildings without a key; they ask for identification from, and run
warrant checks on, young people halted for riding bicycles on the sidewalk.

One night, 20 officers surrounded a man outside the Brownsville Houses
after he would not let an officer smell the contents of his orange
juice container.

Between January 2006 and March 2010, the police made nearly 52,000
stops on these blocks and in these buildings, according to a New York
Times analysis of data provided by the Police Department and two
organizations, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York
Civil Liberties Union. In each of those encounters, officers logged
the names of those stopped - whether they were arrested or not - into
a police database that the police say is valuable in helping solve
future crimes.

These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for every one of
the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances, people were
stopped because the police said they fit the description of a suspect.
But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made based
on "fit description." Far more - nearly 26,000 times - the police
listed either "furtive movement," a catch-all category that critics
say can mean anything, or "other" as the only reason for the stop.
Many of the stops, the data show, were driven by the police's ability
to enforce seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come
and go in the city's public housing.

The encounters - most urgently meant to get guns off the streets -
yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops result in
arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the
arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made
in this neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In
the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.

Greg Jackson, 58, a former professional basketball player who runs the
Brownsville Recreation Center, said the rising tide of stops had left
many who wanted a strong police presence here feeling conflicted.

"Do we welcome the police?" he said, "Of course I do. Ninety-nine
percent of the people in the area do. But they also fear the police
because you can get stopped at any time."

New York is among several major cities across the country that rely
heavily on the stop-and-frisk tactic, but few cities, according to law
enforcement experts, employ it with such intensity. In 2002, the
police citywide documented 97,000 of these stops; last year, the
department registered a record: 580,000.

There are, to be sure, plenty of reasons for the police to be out in
force in this section of Brooklyn, and plenty of reasons for residents
to want them there. Murders, shootings and drug dealing have
historically made this one of the worst crime corridors in the city.

But now, in an era of lower crime rates, both in this part of Brooklyn
and across the city, questions are swirling over what is emerging as a
central tool in the crime fight, one intended to give officers the
power to engage anyone they reasonably suspect has committed a crime
or is about to.

The practice has come under intense scrutiny. Lawmakers are monitoring
the situation. Civil libertarians are challenging it. The Police
Department is studying it. And police officials, from Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly to local precinct commanders, are defending it.

"I don't know what too many stops are," said Deputy Inspector Juanita
Holmes, who until recently was in charge of the department's officers
specifically assigned to protect the housing projects that largely
make up these blocks of Brownsville. "The stops conducted by us are to
address the crime, or the quality-of-life issues."

A Troubled Neighborhood

In a dank stairwell inside 340 Dumont Avenue, a dim light flickers and
the stench of urine fills the air. It was here in 1988 in the Samuel
J. Tilden Houses that Officer Anthony O. McLean took a bullet to the
chest. He had been searching for a missing 10-year-old girl when he
stumbled into a drug deal.

Crime here - a rectangle of housing developments and faded commercial
strips - is hardly what it was in those bloody days. But the labyrinth
of stairwells, hallways, courtyards, lobbies and roofs of the
complexes - 65 buildings ranging from 6-story apartment buildings to
20-story towers - still presents a dangerous challenge for police.

Lobby mailboxes are used for drug transactions. Locks and intercoms
meant to allow in only residents and their visitors are routinely
broken. Officers say they often find bullet casings on the roofs,
where people take target practice or fire in the air in
celebration.

In November 2008, a man delivering meals for charity was shot dead in
a lobby of the Brownsville Houses after delivering food to two elderly
women. Five months later, a 43-year-old woman was stabbed to death
trying to break up a fight outside her apartment in the Tilden Houses.

"It's tough," said Deputy Inspector Holmes, who took over command of
these housing projects in 2008. "A lot of our kids in the area carry
guns. Whether they carry them for protection, 'because I'm trying to
get to school without being victimized,' or they carry them 'because
I'm going to rob somebody today,' there are a lot of guns out there.
And it creates a challenge."

In 2007, the year before she took command, shootings in the five
developments had reached a five-year high. During her first six months
on the job, her officers increased stops by 23 percent from the
previous six months, the data show. The next year, her officers made
more than 10,000 stops.

Deputy Inspector Holmes said she studied the number of stop-and-frisks
in her area closely, and credited them with making the houses safer
for law-abiding residents. She said over the first six months of this
year violent crime was down in almost every category in the five complexes.

But that same success has not been seen outside the developments.
Shootings are up 39 percent in the 73rd Precinct this year. In 2008
the precinct, which includes these blocks of public housing, led the
city in murders, and it consistently has one of the city's highest
rates of violent crime.

Still, Deputy Inspector Samuel Wright, who took over command of the
precinct in January 2009, says stop-and-frisks have "had a significant
impact" on crime reduction.

"In 2008 there were a lot of murders in the 73rd Precinct," he said.
"We were able to reduce homicides by 32 percent in 2009, and I think
that was attributed to the stop, question and frisk policy. We had a
reduction in robberies. We had a reduction in grand larcenies."

Law enforcement experts say that it is very hard, perhaps even
impossible, to draw direct connections between the stop-and-frisk
tactic and significant long-term crime reduction.

Certainly, some say that the New York Police Department has so far
failed to convincingly link the explosion in the numbers of stops with
crime suppression.

And some, from academics to the residents of these streets in
Brooklyn, believe the stops could have a corrosive effect, alienating
young and old alike in a community that has long had a tenuous
relationship with the police.

"This is an important issue, right now, that the N.Y.P.D. must get out
in front of as soon as they can," said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor
of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri, St.
Louis. "And the best way they can do that is to provide credible
evidence that the stop-and-frisk campaign actually is responsible for
the crime reductions the city has enjoyed."

Without that evidence, he said, the stop-and-frisks that do not result
in arrests could "reduce the perceived legitimacy of the police in the
eyes of the public."

One researcher who has studied the impact of stop-and-frisk on crime
insists it is effective. In a 2008 study presented to the City
Council, Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate
School of Public Service at New York University, wrote that the
strategy was effective across the city for robbery, murder, burglary
and auto theft. But it found no citywide impact on assault, rape or
grand larceny. The study also suggested the tool's success varies over
time and often loses effectiveness as the volume of stops increases.

"One important implication is that effective crime fighting requires
continuous innovation," wrote Professor Smith, who is an expert
witness for the Police Department in a lawsuit brought by the Center
for Constitutional Rights over allegations of racial profiling in
stop-and-frisk. "Another is the interventions are blunt instruments
that need to be used with care."

Calls for Sensitivity

To many residents here, care is exactly what is not being used. To
them, the flood of young officers who roam the community each day are
not equipped to make the subtle judgments required to tell one young
man in low-hanging jeans concealing a weapon from another young man
wearing similar clothes on his way to school.

The United States Supreme Court established the legal basis for stops
and frisks - reasonable suspicion of a crime - in the 1968 case of
Terry v. Ohio. But the officer in that case had a far different level
of experience than many of the officers walking the streets of
Brownsville. He had patrolled the same streets of downtown Cleveland
for 30 years looking for pickpockets and shoplifters.

By comparison, the nearly 200 officers who operate in the neighborhood
as part of Mr. Kelly's "Impact Zone" program - flooding problematic
crime pockets with a battery of police - are largely on their first
assignment out of the academy.

The data show the initiative is conducted aggressively, sometimes in
what can seem like a frenzy. During one month - January 2007 - the
police executed an average of 61 stops a day.

The high number of stops in this part of Brooklyn can be explained in
part by the fact that police can use violations of city Housing
Authority rules to justify stops. For instance, the Housing Authority,
which oversees public housing developments, forbids people from being
in their buildings unless they live there or are visiting someone.

And so on a single Friday in January 2009, the police stopped 109
people in this area, 55 of them inside the project buildings, almost
half for suspicion of trespassing. The show of force resulted in two
arrests for misdemeanor possession of marijuana and misdemeanor
possession of a weapon.

Inside the project buildings and out, males 15 to 34 years of age, who
make up about 11 percent of the area's population, accounted for 68
percent of the stops over the years. That amounted to about five stops
a year each, though it was impossible to tell how often someone was
stopped or if that person lived in the neighborhood, because the data
did not include the names or addresses of those stopped. Police
officials say the age figures sound right, since most crime suspects
fit that description.

Young black men get stopped so often that a few years ago, Gus Cyrus,
coach of the football team at nearby Thomas Jefferson High School,
started letting his players leave practice with their bright orange
helmets so the police would not confuse them with gang members.

"My players were always calling me saying 'Coach, the police have me,'
" Mr. Cyrus said.

At an entrance to 305 Livonia Avenue, a 16-story building in Tilden
Houses, the door lock has been broken for weeks. It is the same at 360
Dumont Avenue, negating anyone's need for a key to get inside. At 363
Dumont Avenue, in the Brownsville Houses, another metal lock is broken
to another door.

Young men cluster around the doorways on hot summer evenings. Mothers
sit on benches outside them as they guard children in the courtyard
playgrounds.

And officers are watching. If someone enters without a key, it is
reason to stop them, check for identification and, if necessary, take
out handcuffs.

Many residents say they philosophically embrace the police presence.
They say they know too well how the violence around them - the drugs
and gangs - can swallow up young people.

Yet the day-to-day interactions with officers can seem so arbitrary
that many residents say they often come away from encounters with
officers feeling violated, degraded and resentful.

Almost everyone in the projects has a story. There is Jonathan Guity,
a 26-year-old legal assistant with no criminal record, who, when asked
how many times he had been stopped in the neighborhood where he grew
up, said, "Honestly, I'd say 30 to 40 times. I'm serious."

The most recent stop, he said, was about three months ago after he had
dropped his girlfriend off at the subway. As he walked home listening
to his iPod, he noticed a dark blue Chevrolet following him. Suddenly,
the car pulled up on the sidewalk, and two men jumped out. One put his
hand on Mr. Guity's pants pocket, he said.

"I slapped his hand away and I'm like, 'What are you doingUKP' " Mr.
Guity said. "He was like, 'Oh,' and he pulled out his badge, so he was
like, it was like, 'There was a shooting around here five minutes ago
and you fit the description.' "

Oddly, years ago when crime was higher, relations with the police
seemed better, several residents said. The officers seemed to show a
greater sense of who was law abiding and who was not, they said. Now,
many residents say, the newer crop of officers seem to be more
interested in small offenses than engaging with residents.

"Rookies," said Sandra Carter, 60, as she sat on a bench outside 372
Blake Avenue.

Several residents painted a portrait of officers moving in only to
enforce rules that seemed to always be changing. Once, officers
suddenly began telling people they could not congregate around the
metal hand rails surrounding an entrance to the building, residents
said.

At the local recreation center in Brownsville, Darryl Glenn, 49, stood
in the gym with his son, Darryl Jr., and spoke of the need for
officers to be there - but also of the equal need for them to improve
their performance.

"If anything, there needs to be more police around," said the
teenager, who is headed to college. But, he said, the officers could
better handle some stop situations, particularly by working to get
better descriptions of suspects and by communicating more effectively
the reason for the stop.

"When they give a description, it's, 'Young black man, black pants,
blue shirt, black hat,' " he said. 'That's mostly everybody. A better
description would be better, so they can know who they're looking for,
rather than just everyone walking around."

High Number of Stops

The Times, for this article, interviewed 12 current or former officers
who had worked in this part of Brooklyn in the last five years, and
all defended the necessity of the stop-and-frisks.

But some former officers who worked the area say the stops seem less
geared to bringing down crime than feeding the department's appetite
for numbers - a charge police officials steadfastly deny. Though none
said they were ever given quotas to hit, all but two said that certain
performance measures were implicitly expected in their monthly
activity reports. Lots of stop-and-frisk reports suggested a vigilant
officer.

"When I was there the floor number was 10 a month," one officer said.
Like many of the officers interviewed for this article, he asked not
to be identified because he was still in law enforcement and worried
that being seen as critical of the New York department could hurt his
future employment opportunities.

He said if you produced 10 stops - known as a UF-250 for the
standardized departmental reports the stops generate - you were not
likely to draw the attention of a supervisor. "And in all fairness,"
he said, "if you're working in that area, 10 a month is very low. All
you have to do is open your eyes."

Another former officer who worked in the 73rd Precinct said the
pressure was felt more overtly to get an arrest or a criminal summons,
but in lieu of those, extra 250s would compensate.

"A lot of us didn't want to bang everyone," the officer said. "These
people have a hard enough time in the situation they're living in
without making it worse by hitting them with a summons, having them
travel to Manhattan for criminal court, and the bosses would get upset
and say, 'Well, give us some UF-250s.' It's an easy number."

While each 250 is required to be approved and signed by a supervisor,
one former housing officer said getting them was easy: "Just go to the
well."

The well, said this officer, is the lobby of any of the many housing
buildings. Ryan Sheridan, one of the former officers who said he had
never heard supervisors emphasize numbers, nonetheless acknowledged
that the lobby and hallways were a legitimate source of 250s.

"Once they walk into the building, every UF-250 can come from a
do-not-enter, meaning entering without a key," he said. "But once you
ask them for an ID, 90 percent of the people live in the building.
That's why the arrest rate is so low. They're not acting suspiciously,
but like I said, they don't have a key to enter."

Deputy Inspector Holmes said she never emphasized numbers and scoffed
at the notion that her officers were using broken locks to initiate
250s.

"I think that was bad information," she said.

One recent evening, the police stopped a 19-year-old man for spitting
on the sidewalk, a health code violation, and entering Langston Hughes
Apartments without using a key or being buzzed in, even though the
doors were unlocked. "I've lived here for 19 years," the young man,
who lived in a neighboring building, protested. "You see me coming
into these buildings every day, and now you're going to stop me."

The reaction was natural. "People don't enjoy being stopped going to
and from where they're going," one of the officers, Robert McNamara,
said later. But the officers also had another rationale, he said. They
had spotted the same man near the scene of a dropped gun some days
earlier, and hoped to use the stop to check for outstanding warrants.
None found, they let him go without citing him, using the kind of
discretion necessary in these situations, Officer McNamara said.

Stop-and-frisk is a "valuable tool," he said, "but there needs to be
some common sense when using the tool."