Federal Judge Rules NYC "Stop and Frisk" Violated Rights

In a mixed ruling for Fourth Amendment rights, a federal judge today ruled that NYC's Stop-and-Frisk program violated constitutional rights due to disproportionately targeting minorities. However, despite the program being unconstitutional in its current form, it will not stop. From the New York Times: " 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 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. " The ruling itself (PDF). Bloomberg is furious about the decision, and the city, naturally, intends to appeal.

Comments

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of prostitutes are female. Please submit to your doctor for intro-vaginal camera implantation, female scum.

It is about maintaining fear

[gweihir]

Stop-and-frisk has one aim: Keep certain groups in fear and make sure they do not organize or start defending themselves by strongly implying that they have no rights and that their privacy can be invaded at any time and without any reason. It is a tried and true tactics, optimized by the Nazis and in Stalinism, but created much earlier.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the negative effects that such behaviour would have on the cuban areas and on the mentality of the people living in them, which then makes it more likely that they will live up to the stereotype that has been formed of them.

Think about it... black people are -no- different to us in any way except their appearance. The number of people that escape that trap and become highly successful proves it. So what's different? The people that are like that are like that for no reason other than they have grown up believing that is the slot in which they are placed.

Plus there are plenty of equivalents in every other population group... but the ones that look like you blend into the crowd while those that look different stand out. Therefore you ignore the first and focus on the latter, falsely believing only the latter exist.

Re:I don't understand

[VinylRecords]

That doesn't really work with murder and gang violence. You can't hide gunshots and dead bodies from society. You can massage arrest stats and crime stats for drugs, gambling, prostitution, and even burglaries and auto-theft. Let a few prostitutes go because it's not worth the hassle. Knock down some felony thefts into petty larceny.

Ever seen an arrest sheet for a kid who fires at police with a gun? Kids in gangs have huge arrest sheets. Dozens of violent arrests but all knocked down to minor crimes. It hides the stats and makes NYC look safer. Then these kids get out into the streets and eventually are killed by police after a few robberies, murders, and rapes. All the gang violence by kids like Shaaliver Douse and Kimani Gray are hidden from society until it is too late.

But you can't realistically turn a murder into something else unless you really stretch the truth. You can't say that a dead body filled with bullets was a suicide or a hunting accident in NYC. So these magic fake stats that the police use rarely apply to murder. A body is a body. We are seeing this with the Ft. Hood mass shooting. Obama refuses to call it terrorism because it counts negatively towards his anti-terror stats. So he classifies that as 'workplace violence' when an admitted terrorist is firing into crowds of people screaming 'Allah Akbar'.

The reason why police profile certain races, certain age groups, certain dress types, and other attributes and behaviors, is that those help them narrow down the likely perpetrator of a gang crime. Gang violence in NYC, LA, Detroit, Chicago, is what causes the majority of street murders. Stop and Frisk was meant to profile gang members and then allow police to search them for weapons. It's solved a considerable number of murders. And prevented a considerable number of murders.

The majority of murders solved and prevented by Stop and Frisk have been of black victims. Because black on black crime is almost an epidemic in large urban areas in the United States.

What's really sad

[whoever57]

What's really sad about this is that the act of frisking anyone without any fact-based suspicion is not considered a violation of the constitution. It's only the racial bias in the ways the stops were performed that makes it illegal.

Re:What's really sad

[__aaltlg1547]

Read the opinion, not the press release. Section B concerns the 4th Amendment and states that stops must be based on reasonable suspicion. Section C concerns the fact that race was substituted for reasonable suspicion.

Re: I don't understand

[TubeSteak]

So yeah, reality shows a pretty objective picture, its just that people dont want the truth, they want to show that cops and the government are racist institutions as justifications for doing whatever it is people want to do.

Either you haven't looked very hard for data, or you've done an interesting job cherry picking information to reflect the reality you want to portray.
Here's the results of what I found, it took all of like 5 minutes of googling to find it, so basically anyone with a strong opinion on the subject supporting the NY Police is being intellectually dishonest.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/22/2046451/white-people-stopped-by-new-york-police-are-more-likely-to-have-guns-or-drugs-than-minorities/

• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.

It's unlikely that the appropriate lesson to take from these findings is that stops of white people should increase because they are more likely to carry weapons and drugs. Rather, they suggest that police are excessively targeting minorities. Officers may be netting more successful stops of white New Yorkers because they are only likely to stop a white person when they actually suspect that person of committing a crime

89% of stops result in no action.
That's hundreds of thousands of people who are harassed by the NYPD for no reason other than being young and not-white.

Re:I don't understand

[chihowa]

Thank the move away from requiring mens rea and toward strict liability in recent laws for this. Because, you know, it's easier to prosecute if the perp had no knowledge of, or intention of, committing a crime. We need to fill up those for-profit prisons, and disenfranchise as many voters as possible, and there are only so many actual criminals out there.

Judge says your argument is a logical fallacy

[Camael]

And I think the Judge was right. If you read the Judgment, your argument is the same one the NYC police made.

Right at the start, the Judge said that even if racial profiling is effective at combating crime, being unconstitutional it cannot be used :-

I emphasize at the outset, as I have throughout the litigation, that this case is not about the effectiveness of stop and frisk in deterring or combating crime. This Court’s mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool. Many police practices may be useful for fighting crime — preventive detention or coerced confessions, for example — but because they are unconstitutional they cannot be used, no matter how effective.

The Judge also found as a fact that the stops were not effective. The uncontested facts are :-

Between January 2004 and June 2012, the NYPD conducted over 4.4 million Terry stops.

In 98.5% of the 2.3 million stops where frisks for weapons were conducted, no weapon was found.

88% of the 4.4 million stops resulted in no further law enforcement action.

In 52% of the 4.4 million stops, the person stopped was black, in 31% the person was Hispanic, and in 10% the person was white. In 2010, New York City’s resident population was roughly 23% black, 29% Hispanic, and 33% white.

Weapons were seized in 1.0% of the stops of blacks, 1.1% of the stops of Hispanics, and 1.4% of the stops of whites.

Contraband other than weapons was seized in 1.8% of the stops of blacks, 1.7% of the stops of Hispanics, and 2.3% of the stops of whites.

The key point to note is that although whites were stopped with much less frequency than blacks or Hispanics, the percentage of them found to be carrying weapons or contraband were higher compared to blacks or Hispanics. So you can't even make the argument that black or Hispanics ought to be stopped more than whites because they were more likely to carry weapons or contraband, because this is untrue.

The Judge also disagreed that it was fair to look at crime rates :-

The City and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population. But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent — not criminal. There is no basis for assuming that an innocent population shares the same characteristics as the criminal suspect population in the same area.

To put it in simple terms, if you happen to be black or Hispanic and have been clean all your life, you wouldn't like it if you were stopped simply because you are black or Hispanic.

My gut reaction was originally the same as you, but having read the judgment in more detail I cannot say that the decision was wrong or unjust. I hope Bloomberg will at least read the same judgment.

 

Re:You need to interpret figures based on context

[nbauman]

Read the memorandum in the case.

Many of those stops were on Broadway. I've walked down those very same streets many times. I'm white and I've never been stopped, even when I was walking home late at night. Black guys get stopped.

The thing that impressed me about their testimony is that they sound like really cool guys. They're black law students, medical students, teachers, social workers, etc. They're getting hassled by cops all the time, they're tired of it, and they're responding in reasonable ways. The cops are unreasonably arbitrary and rude, and according to the judge's decision, the cops repeatedly broke the law. These guys filed protests with the police department, complained to the ACLU, and finally took the cops to court. They've got balls. They're complaining that they're being singled out all the time because they're black, and if you read the court documents, they made a pretty good argument.

DAVID FLOYD, et al. vs. THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
David Floyd, et al. vs. The City of New York.

OPINION AND ORDER
08 Civ. 1034 (SAS)
Case 1:08-cv-01034-SAS-HBP Document 373
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/750446/stop-and-frisk-memoranda.pdf

Re:Bloomberg, I have a great PR idea for you!

[davester666]

So now the cops will just do 'fake' s&s's on a whole bunch of white people to make the overall percentages more reasonable.

By 'fake', I mean the cop will stop a random white person, say they want to do a s&s, maybe touch the person on the shoulder, maybe ask to look in their purse, and they are on their way [unlike the regular full ball-sack fondling search].

This will have to dual effect of technically meeting the requirement of not solely targeting minorities, and making white go "why are they complaining about these searches? I/someone I know went through one of these searches and it was trivial."