NYPD's Illegal "Stop & Frisk" Abuse of Citizens Slammed By Federal Judge
NYPD Cops Perform an Illegal "Stop & Frisk"
Article By Juan Gonzalez-New York Daily News, January 8, 2013
On the afternoon of Sept. 16, 2011, 20-year-old Cory Bennett walked out of a building on E. 175th St. in the Bronx and was immediately stopped by two cops.
The officers wanted to know what Bennett had been doing inside. They asked him for identification. Bennett, who was newly arrived in the city from Georgia, told them he lived upstairs with his grandparents. He was rushing to pick up a sandwich he’d ordered by phone from the deli across the street, he said, and had forgotten his ID in the apartment.
The cops could have taken a moment to walk upstairs with him to confirm his story. Or they could have checked at the deli.
But Bennett was just another young black man in the Bronx in the era of mushrooming stop and frisk. That year alone, 685,000 New Yorkers were stopped by police, most of them black and Latino. Ninety percent of those stops resulted in no arrest.
In Bennett’s case, the cops took him into custody and drove him to the 46th Precinct. There they strip-searched him and held him for four hours before slapping him with a summons for disorderly conduct. Two months later, Bennett appeared in court but the arresting officer failed to show up so the case was dismissed.
“Cops fail to show up all the time,” said lawyer Kenneth Ramseur, who filed Bennett’s suit and has dealt with scores of such stop-and-frisk arrests over the years.
A few months ago, the city offered his client a cash settlement but Ramseur turned it down. “They’re not offering enough compensation for the psychological humiliation of a strip search when he did nothing wrong,” Ramseur said.
Bennett was not even a plaintiff in Tuesday’s landmark decision by U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin. But he and Ramseur were elated that a federal judge has finally ordered an end to some of the worst abuses — those involving police stops of innocent people outside Bronx buildings that are part of a decades-old program called “Clean Halls.”
The closer the federal courts look, the more obvious it becomes that these wholesale police stops are shredding the Constitution for a huge portion of our city.
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