Al Baker reports:
It was with a note of triumph that Gov. David A. Paterson, standing with lawmakers, civil libertarians and others, signed a bill last week halting the New York Police Department’s policy of keeping a computer database of people stopped by officers on the street but found to have done nothing wrong.
But as the new law’s fine print became clear, a question emerged: How would the legislation be enforced? The bill failed to include any explicit mechanism for ensuring that the police put an end to the practice, like the appointment of a monitor with auditing powers. It also lacked any penalty provisions for failing to comply with it.
[…]
But it said officers could still stop people to ask questions, and it made clear that they were not barred from collecting people’s personal information and recording it on worksheets they must fill out after each stop, known as UF-250s. It also emphasized that those individual written records will be kept.
Read more in the New York Times.