A Manhattan federal court judge ruled Monday morning that the controversial stop-and-frisk policies and practices of the New York Police Department (NYPD) violated the Constitution.
Stop-and-frisk was ruled as in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted and unreasonable searches. Scheindlin noted that the NYPD had received warnings since as early as 1999 of Fourth Amendment violations with regards to their stop-and-frisk searches, but these were largely ignored, CBS News reports.
According to The Wall Street Journal, judge Sheira Scheindlin appointed an independent monitor, Peter L. Zimroth, to make sure that the stop-and-frisk program would make necessary reforms after she found that “the city acted with deliberate indifference toward the NYPD's practice of making unconstitutional stops and conducting unconstitutional frisks."
Scheindlin added that the NYPD’s practices targeted “racially defined groups” by stopping and frisking a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic men and women as compared with whites. In fact, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), of the almost 600,000 New Yorkers stopped last year, about 87% were either black or Hispanic, and close to 90% were deemed innocent.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Good, Wikimedia Commons