It’s great to have some good news to report. Though the ruling on Monday by Federal Justice Shira Scheindlin doesn’t end the racist and discriminatory policy in New York City, this is being declared a victory for people fighting back against a racist system.
Here’s the statement from the ACLU, and a link to the Center for Constitutional Rights who have been waging the legal battle.
NEW YORK – Today in Floyd v. City of New York, a federal judge ruled that the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices are unconstitutional.
Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Criminal Law Reform Project, said, “The ACLU celebrates today’s decision by Federal Justice Shira Scheindlin declaring the NYPD’s longstanding and widespread stop and frisk practices unconstitutional.
“As the decision exhaustively documents, the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy clearly violated the 4th and 14th Amendments, subjecting millions of innocent New Yorkers – overwhelmingly Black and Latino – to unlawful searches through systemic racial profiling. We hope that today’s decision, and the robust remedies the court has put in place, will mark the end to this dark chapter in the NYPD’s history.”
Judge Scheindlin ruled that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) application of stop and frisk in NYC is unconstitutional, and constituted “indirect racial profiling”.
Her ruling , was 195 pages in length. The NY Times coverage has extensive quotes from her decision.
The judge found that the New York police were too quick to deem suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop. “Blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites,” she wrote. She noted that officers routinely stopped people partly on the basis of “furtive movements,” a category that officers have testified might encompass any of the following: being fidgety, changing directions, walking in a certain way, grabbing at a pocket or looking over one’s shoulder. “If officers believe that the behavior described above constitutes furtive movement that justifies a stop, then it is no surprise that stops so rarely produce evidence of criminal activity,” Judge Scheindlin wrote.
She found that in their zeal to identify concealed weapons, officers sometimes stopped people on the grounds that the officer observed a bulge in the person’s pocket; often it turned out that the bulge was caused not by a gun but by a wallet. “The outline of a commonly carried object such as a wallet or cellphone does not justify a stop or frisk, nor does feeling such an object during a frisk justify a search,” she ruled.
She emphasized what she called the “human toll of unconstitutional stops,” noting that some of the plaintiffs testified that their encounters with the police left them feeling that they did not belong in certain areas of the city. She characterized each stop as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.” “No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” she wrote.
This was breaking news in New York City, and has implications for other cities in the U.S. that have similar policies in place.
Grassroots groups in NYC have been conducting protests and marches against racial profiling by the NYPD for years.
Loud squawking about the ruling came immediately from NYC Mayor Bloomberg:
Mr. Bloomberg pledged that lawyers for the city, in appealing to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, would argue that the judge was biased against the police. As evidence, he cited the fact that the judge, who has overseen numerous stop-and-frisk cases over the last decade, had encouraged the plaintiffs to steer the Floyd case into her courtroom by marking it as related to an earlier case she had overseen.
The mayor said the judge did “not understand how policing works” and had misinterpreted what the Constitution allowed.
This also has direct connections to the current NYC mayoral race. Candidates are already weighing in on the ruling.
International news agencies have also been following this case closely. Here’s a report from AlJazeera:
I just want to give a shout out to everyone who has marched, petitioned, protested and organized to stop “stop and frisk” and remind folks that though we’ve won a battle, we haven’t yet won the war.
The struggle continues, and we’ll keep fighting back.
Cross-posted from Black Kos
12 comments