It was a cold night in February 2012, and I was a sergeant in the 44th Precinct. My team had been sent to the 47th Precinct in the Bronx after a police shooting left a young man dead in his own bathroom. The neighborhood was tense. At roll call, our lieutenant ordered each officer to bring back two stop-and-frisk reports and one summons by the end of the tour.

When he left, I told my cops something different: Do your job honestly. Don’t stop people just to fill numbers.

We came back with five reports instead of dozens. My lieutenant yelled, but I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with was fueling the mistrust already hanging over the community. Every unnecessary stop meant another person losing faith in us.

That night captured what was wrong with the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk era u

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