Federal judge Shira Scheindlin has ruled NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices have been, as many have noted, discriminatory and unconstitutional, saying that they “violated the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of New Yorkers.” Yet, it won’t be banned outright. Monitoring of the procedure is planned for now.
Following a nine-week trial on the issue Judge Scheindlin went on to say, “The City acted with deliberate indifference toward the NYPD’s practice of making unconstitutional stops and conducting unconstitutional frisks,” Judge Scheindlin writes. “In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting ‘the right people’ is racially discriminatory and therefore violates the United States Constitution.”
The ruling flies in the face of the argument made by Nanny State Purveyor and Forever Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly who often stated that the millions of police stops were rightfully conducted in targeting communities of color. As Salon.com reports, “It was revealed that the police worked with a quota system, which encouraged officers to target young black and Latino men in poor areas in order to hand out tickets and make arrests on drug charges, based on stops made without probable cause.”
Scheindlin’s ruling came with proposed remedies wherein she suggests the use of “body cameras” worn by NYPD officers and the appointment of an independent NYPD monitor. Commissioner Kelly laughed the laugh of the insane at the thought of some rube sent in to monitor his well-trained army of police officers. As reported by Gothamist.com, he said earlier this year:
“I think one of the biggest scams in law enforcement is the monitor,” Mr. Kelly says. The plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk suit have demanded such an overseer to watch the police. Mr. Kelly describes how the practice has worked under an “extremely aggressive” U.S. Justice Department going “around to different cities,” where “they’ll find some sort of discriminatory pattern in their minds.”
The feds threaten to sue the cities unless they agree to a civil-rights monitor, and most cities agree, to avoid the cost of litigation. “So it’ll be a politically acceptable lawyer who will be put in there and will always find something wrong, because they get paid. A city like Detroit pays, I don’t know, a couple million dollars a year, whatever, to this firm and guess what? Nothing is ever right, because if I find everything’s right then I stop getting paid.”
This was just one response once the issue of New York City’s stop-and-frisk procedure started gaining national attention, including raising the ire of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder who said that the procedure had been “under review” by the Justice Department. Kelly and Bloomberg went so far as to say that a monitor would actually make the pristine crime void of New York turn into some sort of OK Corral Xanadu where crime will increase and a meddling monitor will put New Yorkers in Danger. This sounds a lot like the Col. Nathan R. Jessup way of thinking, “If we can’t do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, people will die.” However, this theory is unsupported. In fact, the opposite has been true in the cases of federal monitors in place in both Los Angeles and Detroit where there has been improvement, even if slow and measured.
Here is Judge Scheindlin’s rebuttal to the “NYC will be less safe” argument.
Some may worry about the implications of this decision. They may wonder: if the police believe that a particular group of people is disproportionately responsible for crime in one area, why should the police not target that group with increased stops? Why should it matter if the group is defined in part by race?
Indeed, there are contexts in which the Constitution permits considerations of race in law enforcement operations. What is clear, however, is that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits the practices described in this case. A police department may not target a racially defined group for stops in general-that is, for stops based on suspicions of general criminal wrongdoing-simply because members of that group appear frequently in the police department’s suspect data.
So as Bloomberg and Kelly grouse in the corner, both of whom have yet to release a statement about the ruling, the NYPD will get a monitor who’ll oversee reforms to the policy. He can surely expect some interesting things left in his locker down at Police Plaza, right?
But more to the point, while we can’t necessarily paint this as a total win for those who are “walking while black or Latino” at least we can say perhaps the days of complete unchecked police autonomy are numbered.
Image Source: Flickr
