By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in New York, and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.
In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A.
Scheindlin, found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of
indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city would appeal the ruling,
angrily accusing the judge of deliberately not giving the city “a fair
trial.”
The mayor cited the benefits of stop-and-frisk, crediting the tactic for
making the city safer and for ridding the streets of thousands of
illegal guns.
But in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin found that in doing so, the police
systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any
objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing.
The stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime
continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth
Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by
the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection
clause, according to the 195-page decision.
Judge Scheindlin’s criticism extended beyond the conduct of police
officers; in holding the city liable for a battery of constitutional
violations, the judge found that top police officials acted with
deliberate indifference. She said that police commanders were content to
dismiss allegations of racial profiling as “a myth created by the
media.”
Citing statements by the mayor and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly,
Judge Scheindlin accused the city of using stop-and-frisk as a
checkpoint-style policing tactic, with the intent of deterring
minorities from carrying guns on the street.
“I also conclude that the city’s highest officials have turned a blind
eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially
discriminatory manner,” she wrote.
The judge designated an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the
Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution.
Judge Scheindlin also ordered a number of other remedies, including a
pilot program in which officers in at least five precincts across the
city will wear body-worn cameras in an effort to record street
encounters. She also ordered a “joint remedial process” — in essence, a
series of community meetings — to solicit public input on how to reform
stop-and-frisk.
The decision to install Mr. Zimroth, a partner in the New York office of
Arnold & Porter LLP, and a former corporation counsel and
prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, will leave the
department under a degree of judicial control that is certain to shape
the policing strategies under the next mayor.
The Supreme Court had long ago ruled that stop-and-frisks were
constitutionally permissible under certain conditions, and Judge
Scheindlin stressed that she was “not ordering an end to the practice.”
But she said that changes were needed to ensure that the street stops
were carried out in a manner that “protects the rights and liberties of
all New Yorkers, while still providing much needed police protection.”
The judge found that the New York police were too quick to deem as
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 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 cities. She characterized each stop as “a
demeaning and humiliating experience.”
“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,” the judge wrote.
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Lalit Clarkson, 31, a union
organizer, said after the ruling that “the stop-and-frisk policy
criminalizes a whole race and community of people, just for going to
work, going to get some food, going on a train to go downtown.”
The decision, he said, represents the legal system’s validation of what
the black community has known for a long time: that the stop-and-frisk
practice relies on racial profiling.
“What we know, in our community, to be the truth, has never before gone
through a massive legal process” and been “shown, point by point, step
by step” to be true, he said.
The judge’s ruling, in Floyd v. City of New York, a 2008 class-action
lawsuit that represents the broadest legal challenge to the department’s
practices, follows a two-month nonjury trial in Federal District Court
in Manhattan earlier this year. Her decision cites testimony of about a
dozen black or biracial men and one woman who described being stopped,
as well as the conclusions of statistical experts who studied police
paperwork describing some 4.43 million stops between 2004 and the middle
of 2012.
But the stops were not the end of the problem, Judge Scheindlin found.
After officers stopped people, they often conducted frisks for weapons,
or searched the subjects’ pockets for contraband, like drugs, without
any legal grounds for doing so. Also, she found that during police
stops, blacks and Hispanics “were more likely to be subjected to the use
of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to
be found with weapons or contraband.”
About 83 percent of the stops between 2004 and 2012 involved blacks and
Hispanics, even though those two demographics make up just slightly more
than 50 percent of the city’s residents. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly
have explained that disparity by saying it mirrored the disproportionate
percentage of crimes committed by young minority men. But Judge
Scheindlin dismissed the Police Department’s rationale.
“This might be a valid comparison if the people stopped were criminals,”
Judge Scheindlin wrote, explaining that there was significant evidence
that the people being stopped were not criminals. “To the contrary,
nearly 90 percent of the people stopped are released without the officer
finding any basis for a summons or arrest.”
Rather, Judge Scheindlin found, the stops overwhelmingly involved
minority men because police commanders had come to see them as “the
right people” to stop.
“It is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group
to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group are
criminals,” she wrote.
Mr. Bloomberg pledged that lawyers for the city, in its expected appeal
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.