New York City Police Department cruiser.

Plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk litigation against the New York City Police Department said that a federal monitor's proposed confidentiality order would hide key data, such as how often officers are stopping subjects, under a blanket of secrecy.

They said the order amounts to a departure from the normal civil procedure.

The plaintiffs, the NYPD and interested parties are awaiting a ruling from U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York on federal monitor Peter Zimroth's order to allow confidential information and communications to be disclosed to the public via Zimroth's regular reports.

However, the order would prevent the parties from sharing confidential information that hasn't already been disclosed in Zimroth's reports to amicus parties in the case.

In April, plaintiffs counsel Jenn Rolnick Borchetta of The Bronx Defenders, Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Angel Harris of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. co-authored an op-ed for The New York Times in which they wrote that officers failed to record stop-and-frisk stops 73 percent of the time and that black and Latino people made up 80 percent of recorded stops.

The op-ed also stated that the parties in the case were working to develop reforms to both stop-and-frisk and trespass stops, which tend to disproportionately affect public housing residents and their guests; one set of reforms would be developed through negotiations between parties in the litigation, the op-ed stated, and the other would be developed through community input.

“The problem is the police department suggested that it might oppose reforms that black and Latino New Yorkers are asking for,” the plaintiffs lawyers wrote.  

In July, Zimroth, a former New York City Corporation Counsel who is now with Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, sent the confidentiality proposed order to Torres, arguing that the order would be in the best interest of the parties moving forward. Without it, he said, the remedial phase of the litigation could be “seriously compromised.”

Zimroth declined to comment. He has served as a monitor in the case since 2015 and since then has issued a dozen reports, including two in the past year stating that officers were underreporting their stops as well as failing to log the reasons for making them.

Last year, he also signed off on the NYPD's body-worn camera pilot program, which began with providing cameras to a group of 1,200 officers.

In a letter filed with Torres earlier this month, Assistant Corporation Counsel David Cooper of the city's Law Department cited the plaintiffs attorneys op-ed in the Times as justification for Zimroth's confidentiality proposed order, arguing that the order would be needed to “restore trust” in the reform process.

The op-ed gave the NYPD “legitimate concerns about sharing material with plaintiffs' counsel that they are not legally compelled to share, out of fear that remedial measures will be litigated in the press as opposed to negotiated in the context of the monitorship,” Cooper wrote.

In a statement, a Law Department reaffirmed the city's support for Zimroth's motion.

“We agree with the monitor that a confidentiality order that preserves the public's right to access relevant information about the case would increase collaboration between the parties and help us continue the progress we've made in implementing these historic reforms,” said Law Department spokesman Nicholas Paolucci.

But in an amicus brief filed last week, Communities United for Police Reform argued that the remaining work in the case involves ensuring the NYPD's continued compliance with court-ordered reforms and that granting the order would stifle the public's ability to keep the department accountable.

In an interview, Charney said that imposing a blanket confidentiality order on information from the department amounts to doing civil procedure “backwards.”  

He also said that the confidentiality order would violate the spirit of the litigation, which should “err on the side of the more transparent,” and that Zimroth's reports are sometimes short on details.

“I think it's hard for the public to say, 'Oh, I'll take his word for it,' and be shut out of the process,” Charney said.