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NYPD’s controversial ‘Stop & Frisk’ policy ruled unconstitutional
January 8, 2013
A key part of the NYPD’s controversial “stop and frisk” tactic has been ruled unconstitutional.
Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered police to refrain from making trespass stops outside private residential buildings — even though the landlord has given officers permission to do so as part of the NYPD’s “Clean Halls” program.
“While it may be difficult to say when precisely to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters such a line exists, and the NYPD has systematically crossed it when making trespass stops outside buildings,” Scheindlin wrote in a 157-page ruling.
The New York Civil Liberties Union argued in an eight-day hearing in October that “Clean Halls,” which exists only in the Bronx, leads to people being hassled by cops and sometimes cuffed near their own abode for no legitimate reason.
The NYCLU’s legal challenge centers on the case of Jaenean Ligon.
In August 2011 the mother of three sent her 17-year-old son to buy ketchup for the family’s dinner.
Two plaintclothes cops stopped the teen outside the family’s building on E. 163rd St. in the Bronx. Two uniformed officers also arrived on the scene.
After frisking the youngster, one of the cops buzzed Ligon’s apartment and asked she come downstairs to identify her son. Ligon testified the request sent her into a panic because she feared the worst — that her son had been seriously hurt or killed.
NYCLU lawyers argued that Ligon’s experience was all too common in high-crime neighborhoods in the Bronx where the “Clean Halls” program is in place.
At least one Bronx prosecutor, Jeannette Rucker, expressed skepticism about the legality of the practice, as well.
Rucker notified the NYPD in July of last year that her office would no longer rubber-stamp trespassing arrests made outside Clean Halls buildings and public housing projects unless the arresting officer was interviewed.
In addition to immediately halting such trespass stops in the Bronx, Scheindlin ordered a Jan. 31 hearing to determine what other relief should be granted.
“For those of us who do not fear being stopped as we approach or leave our own homes or those of our friend and family, it is difficult to believe that residents of one of our boroughs live under such a threat,” she wrote.
Two other stop and frisk cases are pending.
![Judge rules that millions can sue NYPD over stop-and-friskOctober 23, 2012
A federal judge in New York has given the go ahead for a class action lawsuit to move forward against the city’s police department over allegations that its stop-and-frisk program has continuously allowed officers to discriminate against minorities.
In a ruling made Wednesday by US District Judge Shira Scheindlin, the pending suit against the NYPD, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others was granted class action status.
Authorities seem nonplussed.
When asked for his take on Judge Scheindlin’s decision, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told the New York Times that he had no comment because the litigation was continuing, but offered one quip: “It is what it is.”
Mayor Bloomberg also said he couldn’t comment specifically on the ruling, but, according to the Associated Press, had some words nonetheless.
“Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize – he’s not going to and neither am I – for saving 5,600 lives. And I think it’s fair to say that stop, question and frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD’s work; it’s taken more than 6,000 guns off the streets in the last eight years, and this year we are on pace to have the lowest number of murders in recorded history. … We’re not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public safety,” said the mayor.
For others, however, it doesn’t seem as clear cut; in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin decries, “First, suspicionless stops should never occur.”
The current case began to take hold all the way back in 2008 when attorneys representing four plaintiffs first began seeking class action status. The four original named plaintiffs say that they were wrongfully stopped and frisked based on their race. In only 2011, the NYPD stopped 685,724 New Yorkers, reports the American Civil Liberties Union. In all, 89 percent of those stopped were either black or Latino. Of the nearly 700,000 cases in that year alone, 88 percent of the people stopped were found innocent. Such statistics are largely typical for previous years, although one thing that has changed as time has gone on is the number of pedestrians stopped by law enforcement.
“[T]he policing policies that the city has implemented over the past decade and half have led to a dramatic increase in the number of pedestrian stops, to the point of now reaching almost 600,000 a year,” Judge Scheindlin wrote of the case earlier this year.
Now anyone that feels they have been victimized similarly by the New York Police Department by means of an invasive and unwarranted search since 2005 can add their name to the case.
By way of the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policies, police officers in the Big Apple are allowed to conduct searches of suspicious persons if they have reason to believe that they are committing a crime. Statistics documenting the history of the program reveal, however, that skin color seems to play a pivotal role when the police are left to decide who is frisked and who isn’t.
Judge Scheindlin says it is unlikely that many people will sign on to the case, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many who would be excluded from doing so. The NYPD has already stopped and frisked more than 200,000 people on the streets of New York in the first three months of 2012 alone; between 2004 and 2009, around 2.8 million similar stops were carried out.
“This case presents an issue of great public concern: the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos, as compared to Whites, who become entangled in the criminal justice system,” the judge writes in her ruling. “The specific claims raised in this case are narrower but they are raised in the context of the extensively documented racial disparities in the rates of stops, arrests, convictions, and sentences that continue through the present day.”
Elsewhere in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin says that the NYPD’s arguments in favor of the program appear “cavalier”and display “a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”
In a statement offered to the AP, the law office for the city of New York says, “We respectfully disagree with the decision and are reviewing our legal options.”
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In the words of NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, “It is what it is” - Legalized racial profiling.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mccx5gFWzP1r6m2leo1_500.jpg)
Judge rules that millions can sue NYPD over stop-and-frisk
October 23, 2012
A federal judge in New York has given the go ahead for a class action lawsuit to move forward against the city’s police department over allegations that its stop-and-frisk program has continuously allowed officers to discriminate against minorities.
In a ruling made Wednesday by US District Judge Shira Scheindlin, the pending suit against the NYPD, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others was granted class action status.
Authorities seem nonplussed.
When asked for his take on Judge Scheindlin’s decision, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told the New York Times that he had no comment because the litigation was continuing, but offered one quip: “It is what it is.”
Mayor Bloomberg also said he couldn’t comment specifically on the ruling, but, according to the Associated Press, had some words nonetheless.
“Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize – he’s not going to and neither am I – for saving 5,600 lives. And I think it’s fair to say that stop, question and frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD’s work; it’s taken more than 6,000 guns off the streets in the last eight years, and this year we are on pace to have the lowest number of murders in recorded history. … We’re not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public safety,” said the mayor.
For others, however, it doesn’t seem as clear cut; in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin decries, “First, suspicionless stops should never occur.”
The current case began to take hold all the way back in 2008 when attorneys representing four plaintiffs first began seeking class action status. The four original named plaintiffs say that they were wrongfully stopped and frisked based on their race. In only 2011, the NYPD stopped 685,724 New Yorkers, reports the American Civil Liberties Union. In all, 89 percent of those stopped were either black or Latino. Of the nearly 700,000 cases in that year alone, 88 percent of the people stopped were found innocent. Such statistics are largely typical for previous years, although one thing that has changed as time has gone on is the number of pedestrians stopped by law enforcement.
“[T]he policing policies that the city has implemented over the past decade and half have led to a dramatic increase in the number of pedestrian stops, to the point of now reaching almost 600,000 a year,” Judge Scheindlin wrote of the case earlier this year.
Now anyone that feels they have been victimized similarly by the New York Police Department by means of an invasive and unwarranted search since 2005 can add their name to the case.
By way of the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policies, police officers in the Big Apple are allowed to conduct searches of suspicious persons if they have reason to believe that they are committing a crime. Statistics documenting the history of the program reveal, however, that skin color seems to play a pivotal role when the police are left to decide who is frisked and who isn’t.
Judge Scheindlin says it is unlikely that many people will sign on to the case, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many who would be excluded from doing so. The NYPD has already stopped and frisked more than 200,000 people on the streets of New York in the first three months of 2012 alone; between 2004 and 2009, around 2.8 million similar stops were carried out.
“This case presents an issue of great public concern: the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos, as compared to Whites, who become entangled in the criminal justice system,” the judge writes in her ruling. “The specific claims raised in this case are narrower but they are raised in the context of the extensively documented racial disparities in the rates of stops, arrests, convictions, and sentences that continue through the present day.”
Elsewhere in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin says that the NYPD’s arguments in favor of the program appear “cavalier”and display “a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”
In a statement offered to the AP, the law office for the city of New York says, “We respectfully disagree with the decision and are reviewing our legal options.”
In the words of NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, “It is what it is” - Legalized racial profiling.
Stopped-and-Frisked: ‘For Being a F**king Mutt’
On June 3, 2011, three plainclothes New York City Police officers stopped a Harlem teenager named Alvin and two of the officers questioned and frisked him while the third remained in their unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in action.
In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.”
NYPD targets police brutality activist in an attempt to silence him
July 22, 2012
The NYPD and New York City courts are trying to silence you—and everyone who stands up for justice and against racism—by going after a leading anti-police-brutality and anti-racial-profiling activist, Joseph “Jazz” Hayden.
Jazz has been fighting police abuse and violence for years and is a founding member of the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow. Long before the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy started to become notorious nationwide and tens of thousands marched to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s house in protest, Jazz was one of the dozens of activists dedicated to organizing against it and documenting police racism. His website AllThingsHarlem.com has four years of his videos showing New York police as they target and search young Blacks and Latinos.
Now the NYPD is striking back. Two police officers conducted an illegal search of Jazz’s car in December of last year—the same police who Jazz videotaped a few months earlier conducting another illegal car search involving two other African American men. In the video, police can be heard trying to intimidate Jazz, saying, “We know your background. I know who you are.”
The cops let those two men go without any charges or tickets, having had no legal reason to stop them in the first place and being unable to charge them for the real reason they picked out: being Black.
But the police didn’t forget Jazz, and in December, when the same two officers stopped him, they said, “We know you.” Jazz was detained and held for nearly two days before a prosecutor tried to force him to post a $16,000 bond.
Jazz is facing two felony counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, which could put him behind bars for two to seven years if he is convicted.
The weapons? A penknife and a commemorative mini-replica of a baseball bat. Both are absurdly harmless and completely legal to carry, unlike the car search the police conducted to “discover” them.
