At 14, Rocky Harris knows the routine: You raise your hands high, you keep your mouth shut and you don't dare move a muscle.
Then the police officer's gloved hands go up and down each leg, around your waist, across your chest and back, then down your shoulders to your wrists.
When they don't find guns or drugs, Rocky said, they let you go. He said that he had been searched, fruitlessly, at least three times since last summer, and that he had friends who had been searched repeatedly.
''They tell you that you're selling drugs. But I don't do nothing wrong. I just play ball,'' he said, walking through the Red Hook East housing development in Brooklyn yesterday morning, headed to a community center for a game of basketball.
On Friday, the New York Police Department released a report showing that police officers stopped 508,540 people on city streets in 2006, an average of 1,393 a day and quintuple the number from 2002. While it was difficult to find a consensus on the significance of those statistics -- good patrolling, overly aggressive officers and more faithful recordkeeping are just a few explanations -- it was not hard yesterday in Red Hook to find a handful of that number walking around.
More than half of those stopped, and sometimes frisked, by the police were black. The Red Hook projects have a large black population, a history of crime problems and, at least in a few young men, a wariness of the police.
Mikel Jamison, 32, said that ''he came up in these Brooklyn streets,'' and that it is ''hard being an African-American, hard to live and walk down the street without the police harassing us.''
Mr. Jamison said some young men bring the unwanted attention of police on them, ''with their pants down to their ankles and drugs in their pockets.'' He then urged that he and this reporter keep their voices down because ''some of the dealers, they're out here right now.''
But he said he blames police practices like the stop-and-frisks for tension between the community and the police. He said many officers might want to stop crime in the community, but many cannot discern between common criminals and the common people who live among them.
After having a police officer jam a gun in his chest a few years ago, in an incident he said he would rather not discuss, Mr. Jamison said he converted to Islam and is now more conscious of the way the community is affected by such police actions.
Anthony James, 28, who works for a large sanitation company and, as such, often keeps late hours, said the police frequently stop him as he leaves or comes home. He said that the stops had become such a problem that he has taken to carrying his work identification badge home to prove to the police that he has a job and is not selling drugs.
''You see where you're standing. This is the Red Zone,'' he said, mapping with his hands a section of the projects from Columbia Street to Clinton Avenue. ''This is the war zone. If they catch you in here alone they're going to stop you. And they'll play mind games with you. Ten minutes after searching you, they'll come back by, just staring.''
Mr. James, who said his ''bad-boy days'' are behind him, said officers doing the stops will say that the basis of the stops is that people are coming out of known ''drug buildings.''
''But we live here. I put my 7-year-old son to bed here. We have grandmas and old ladies up in here. This ain't just a drug building, this is home,'' he said. ''It's serious and dangerous out here, and they wonder why some people want to pull out their guns and start blasting.''
Dorothy Shields, 74, has served as president of the tenants association at the Red Hook East housing development for 33 years, and said she believes the issue is less about people being picked on by the police, and more about a new generation of young people who do not have respect for authority, or their neighbors for that matter.
Ms. Shields said she doubted some of the reports of overaggressive patrolling. ''Some of them young men are not telling the truth about the police officers,'' she said. ''A lot of them feel they should be able to do anything they want do, wherever and whenever they want to.''
Ms. Shields said she thinks frisks, at least in her neighborhood, are happening but not as much as some suggested.
''Some people just don't care for the police, no matter how right or wrong they are,'' she said.
At a press conference outside police headquarters yesterday, representatives of black and Hispanic officers' groups called the data damning, and renewed calls for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly to step down.
''These numbers substantiate what we've been saying for years,'' said Noel Leader, a co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. ''The New York Police Department under Raymond Kelly is actively committing some of the grossest forms of racial profiling in the history of the New York Police Department.''
The Police Department said that officers stop people only if they are suspected of committing a crime, and that the practice is vital in getting guns off the streets. About 21,000 of the stops ended in arrests and about 29,000 in summonses.
''I think it is one tool,'' Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne said yesterday. ''One law enforcement tool that is used to apply pressure. One of many.''
Responding to complaints of profiling, the department noted that while 55.2 percent of those stopped were black, 68.5 percent of reported crimes involved suspects described as black.
Mr. Browne said he could not speak about patrolling in Red Hook with any authority, but that in general the increase in reported stop-and-frisks was a result of the more scrupulous recording of such stops.
''I think some of the individuals who have been critical of the department in the past will be critical of the department for this as well,'' he said.
At the community center in Red Hook where Rocky Harris had gone to play basketball, a 50-year-old man named Stanley, who is a big brother of sorts at the center, was shooting pool.
When asked if he had been stopped and frisked by the police, Stanley, who said he did not want his last name published, said, ''I'm an old man now, and they don't bother me one bit. It's the youth that they're after. Not me.''