On Monday, Aug. 12, New York’s Federal Court Judge Schira Scheindlin ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a class action suit brought against the City of New York and its “Stop and Frisk” policy. Her ruling cited the unconstitutionality of the policy, which targeted mostly young blacks and Latinos, and that it was in direct violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.
She called upon the federal Department of Justice to independently monitor NYPD’s practices, and for an independent counsel to oversee development and implementation of a new law enforcement policy that protects New York’s citizens from this type of police harassment.
In a phrase, Judge Scheindlin dropped a pebble in a pool. The depth of that pool we have yet to uncover, but the ripple effect could be even more profound.
The judge’s decision found that New York’s “[Stop and Frisk] policy violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizures, as well as the 14th Amendment which guarantees ‘due process’ of American citizens.” The controversial program, begun 2004, led to 5 million stops of mostly black and Latino men. Most — 90% — were found innocent. The judge noted in these findings that Stop and Frisk encouraged targeting these young men based on prevalence in local crime complaints, and as statistics noted, not on reality. The street name for this is “racial profiling.”