A federal judge has ruled that the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy does violate constitutional rights, a major blow to a crime fighting tool that the mayor and police commissioner have defended. But critics have repeatedly stated that it is racial profiling, since those who are stopped by police are mostly minorities.
Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled Monday that police have been stopping people on the street with no reason to presume that they have done anything wrong and searching them, notes The New York Times. Therefore, the policy violates the Fourth amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
Sheindlin added that NYC “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling by targeting racially defined groups for stops based on local crime suspect data.” She disagreed with the government’s argument that the policy is used mostly in minority neighborhoods because those are where more crime takes place.
“They have received both actual and constructive notice since at least 1999 of widespread Fourth Amendment violations occurring as a result of the NYPD's stop and frisk practices,” the judge wrote in her 192-page opinion. “Despite this notice, they deliberately maintained and even escalated policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread Fourth Amendment violations.”
She noted that being stopped and frisked has become a “fact of daily life in some New York City neighborhoods” because it is used so often by officers.
According to CBS News, Scheindlin appointed Peter L. Zimroth, a former district attorney, as an independent monitor to keep an eye on how the NYPD implements changes.
Scheindlin made her ruling in the Floyd v. City of New York case, following testimony from men and women who said they were searched by police because of their race. She also looked over paperwork from police that included over 4.43 million cases of stop-and-frisk from 2004 to mid-2012.
The city has not issued an immediate response to the ruling.