The stop and frisk data in New York City is giving the public a never before seen window into the stops made by NPYD officers.

New York City, NY — NEW YORK -- New York City is home to 8.5 million people -- among those are 36,000 officers. The city also happens to have a new way police do stop and frisks.

The debate about stop and frisk in New York goes back nearly two decades. And involves lawsuits, landmark court rulings, and now the most comprehensive stop and frisk reporting system the city has ever seen.

“It’s a tremendous effort,” said Nancy Hoppock, Assistant Deputy Commissioner for NYPD.

Hoppock oversees the department’s monitoring of stop and frisk, a tracking system that was overhauled in 2015 after a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

Senior Attorney Darius Charney challenged a system with almost the same racial disparities a WUSA9 investigation uncovered in the district, where 8 out of 10 stop and frisks are done on African Americans.

“That’s the same exact disproportionally we had in New York, which is what led to our case, which is what led to all the court rulings and changes around stop and frisk,” Charney said.

Those changes forced NYPD officers to fill out a comprehensive reporting form every time they stop and frisk someone. A very similar data was seen in D.C. and police are now required to collect under the NEAR Act.

But police chief Peter Newsham now admits the department has failed to follow the two-year-old law, continuing to document only limited data about stop and frisk.

Charney said there are huge gaps in the reporting when a department is only collecting things like age, race, date of a stop and location.

“We’re missing whether or not the stop was legal,” Charney said. “In other words, why did the officer make the stop?”

The stop and frisk data in New York City is giving the public a never before seen window into the stops made by NPYD officers. But NYPD says answering the central question, how many of them are justified, is more complicated.

An audit released last December “found reasonable suspicion” in 71 percent of NYPD’s 2017 stops. But Hoppock said that doesn’t mean the remaining 29 percent of stops, are not justified.

“And that’s the limitation of using paper,” she said.

Hoppock said while some of the stops studied in that audit were found to be unjustified by supervisors who reviewed them, others were simply not “articulated” by officers correctly. Meaning they were justified just not recorded in a way that demonstrated why.

Despite its shortcomings, Hoppock calls the new stop and frisk reporting the system NYPD needs.

“You are going to get no argument from the NYPD that it is important to collect data about our enforcement activity,” Hoppock said. “And to share that data with the people we police. It’s important for our trust, it’s important for our transparency.”

Still, Hoppock says that transparency comes at a price.

“We do worry about, an officer that’s on patrol today, a lot is expected of her, a lot,” Hoppock said.

“Giving her too much paperwork to do, we worry about that. We want to find that sweet spot of tracking the data, collecting the data points, but not overburdening the officer.”

Even Charney admits the new system is a work in progress. While the number of police stops in New York is way down, huge racial disparities among those who are stopped by NYPD remain.

When you have that type of disproportionally I think it needs to be looked at,” Charney said. “And then we need to look deeper at why are all these black men, and women being stopped.”