A US Federal Judge found that stop-and-search tactics used by the New York Police Department have violated the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of citizens and are racist, and called for a federal monitor to oversee reforms to the policy.
Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that police officers have been
systematically stopping innocent people in the street without any
objective evidence that they had been committing an offence. Cops
usually searched young black and Latino men for weapons or drugs
before letting them go.
The ruling follows a more-than-two-month non-jury trial. The 195
page decision found that in 88 percent of ‘stop and frisks’ the
police ended up letting the person go without an arrest or a
ticket.
The judge said this percentage was so high it suggested there was
no credible reason to suspect someone of criminality in the first
place.
She found that the stop-and-frisk-episodes had demonstrated a
widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects
against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and
also violated the 14th Amendment, which addresses citizens’ equal
rights and protection under the law, regardless of their race or
ethnicity.
Scheindlin also ruled that she would designate an outside lawyer,
Peter L. Zimroth, a former corporate counsel and prosecutor in
the Manhattan district attorney’s office, to monitor the NYPD’s
compliance with the Constitution. This will leave the
New York police under a degree of judicial control that will
doubtless shape policing policies under the next mayor.
“Far too many people in New York city have been deprived of
this basic freedom far too often. The NYPD’s practice of making
stops that lack individualized reasonable suspicion has been so
pervasive and persistent as to become not only part of the NYPD
standard operating procedure, but a fact of daily life in some
New York City neighborhoods,” she said.
She added that the plaintiffs who had instigated the case
“readily established that the NYPD implements its policies
regarding stop and frisk in a manner that intentionally
discriminates based on race.”
The stop-and-frisk incidents are part of incumbent Mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s tough crime-fighting legacy, and although the number
of people searched has soared over the last decade, crime has
continued to fall since the 1990s.
Scheindlin heard evidence from a dozen black, Latino or biracial
people who had been stopped by police as well as from statistical
experts who had examined police paper work detailing some 4.43
million stops between 2004 and the middle of 2012. A number of
police officers and commanders also gave evidence; typically they
defended their own actions saying they only made the stops when
they thought criminal activity was occurring.
The judge found that the New York police had overstepped their
authority to briefly stop and investigate people who are behaving
suspiciously and that in effect they were watering down the legal
minimum standard required to stop someone.
Legal experts said that this was the largest and
broadest-sweeping case against the US’s largest police force, and
that this ruling may have an effect on how other police
departments conduct street stops.
The NYPD and the mayor’s office are yet to comment on the
decision.
Republished from: RT