NEW YORK, NY August 14, 2009 —The New York Civil Liberties Union says the NYPD is on pace to break last year's record for stop and frisk encounters. WNYC's Bob Hennelly has more.

In the first half of this year, the NYPD made 311,000 stop frisks. More than 90 percent of those were black or Latino individuals. That's a 15 percent jump from the same period in 2008. Chris Dunn with the NYCLU says only 12 percent of those stops actually produce an arrest or a summons.

DUNN: Eighty-eight percent of the people, of the hundreds of thousands of people the department is stopping and frisking, 88 percent of them are law abiding citizens who've done absolutely nothing wrong."

Dunn says the practice alienates communities of color from the police. In a statement, the NYPD denies it engaged in racial profiling, saying the racial percentages of those stopped is proportional to the racial breakdown of suspect descriptions from crime victims. For WNYC I am Bob Hennelly.