A legally blind African-American man has filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department, claiming he was falsely arrested under the department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program.
Allen Moye, a 54-year-old man from Jamaica, Queens, is the first
person to file a lawsuit against the NYPD since a federal court
ruled
against the stop-and-frisk program earlier this month. In the
suit, Moye says that police illegally came after him and violated
his civil rights.
He says he was arrested on false charges while he was waiting for
a friend at a Harlem street corner in September 2010. Wearing
glasses and using a cane to get around, he was approached by a
half-dozen NYPD officers on W. 118thStreet. Police
stopped and frisked him in a manner that Moye described as
“rough.”
“And they didn’t tell me what I did or nothing,” he told
the New York Post. “They just went through [my clothes] like I
wasn’t even there, and told me, ‘What are you doing here?’ What
do you mean, like I’m from another planet? I thought this was a
free country and you can go anywhere.”
Moye says that after he complained about the search, he was taken
into custody for making the complaint.
“It was racial profiling, what they did,” he told the New
York Daily News. “…It’s a different Jim Crow. They try to put
everybody behind bars to do their work.”
Moye says he is traumatized by the incident and has not returned
to Harlem since the day he was arrested. He says the police there
are “like Nazis.”
In the lawsuit, Moye cites the decision
made by US District Court Judge Shira Sheindlin, who issued an
opinion ruling that the NYPD violated the Fourth and Fourteenth
Amendments through the manner in which they conducted
stop-and-frisks.
The Manhattan judge ordered the NYPD to end the policy, which is
part of the city’s “Clean Halls” program of stopping ‘suspicious’
people outside of residential apartment blocks and subjecting
them to random searches.
“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’s ruling reads.
Moye is seeking monetary damages for the alleged trauma he
endured as a result of racial profiling.
Although Moye’s lawsuit is the first filed in wake of the federal
ruling on stop-and-frisk, it is unlikely to be the last. Earlier
this week, New York City lawyers predicted that a slew of
lawsuits would likely follow the decision made by Judge
Scheindlin, with plaintiffs arguing that their civil rights were
violated by the city. The Bloomberg administration is still
trying to appeal the decision, and city lawyers have asked
Scheindlin to hold off on court-ordered reforms for the time
being.
“Individuals who believe they are aggrieved during the
pendency of the requested stay will still have full opportunity
to litigate any claims for money damages due to alleged
unconstitutional stop-and-frisk activity,” the lawyers
wrote.
Republished from: RT