In a 195-page decision issued on Monday morning, federal judge Shira A. Schleindlin found that the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy violated the Fourth Amendment and 14th Amendment rights of minorities in New York and appointed an outside monitor to oversee changes to the policy. Schleindlin underlined what she characterized as the "disproportionate and discriminatory stopping of blacks and Hispanics" and charged that senior officials in the department had "turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner". The decision marks a significant rebuke to a hotly contested policy which Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly had called "essential" only weeks ago.
Of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the judge wrote that "far too many people in New York City have been deprived of this basic freedom far too often", adding, "The NYPD's practice of making stops that lack individualized reasonable suspicion has been so pervasive and persistent as to become not only a part of the NYPD's standard operating procedure, but a fact of daily life in some New York City neighborhoods."
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Schleindlin also found that the city violated 14th Amendment rights to equal protection in its "policy of indirect racial profiling".
"Throughout this litigation the City has acknowledged and defended the NYPD's policy of conducting stops based in part on criminal suspect data, of which race is a primary factor...in practice, officers are directed, sometimes expressly, to target certain racially defined groups for stops," she wrote, before later concluding, "The City's policy of targeting 'the right people' for stops clearly violates the Equal Protection clause".
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The judge appointed Peter L. Zimroth, who the New York Times describes as a partner at the New York offices of Arnold & Porter and former corporation counsel and prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office, to ensure that the NYPD complies with the ruling. Zimroth promises to be unpopular with NYPD officials - Commissioner Kelly has called the idea of an independent monitor "one of the biggest scams in law enforcement", while Mayor Bloomberg has fought bitterly against bills which would have established independent oversight of the police department.
Earlier in August, the Bloomberg administration agreed to settle a state lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union in agreeing to end the NYPD's practice of storing in an electronic database the names and addresses of people who had been stopped, arrested or issued a summons but afterward either had their case dismissed or resolved with a fine.
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Clive Lino, a thirty-two-year-old graduate student and social worker who had served as the lead plaintiff in that earlier lawsuit after he was stopped and frisked while he and a friend waited for their takeout order to be ready at a Chinese restaurant in the Bronx, was mentioned in Schleindlin's decision as an example of a case in which officers lacked reasonable suspicion in carrying out the procedure.
According to the Wall Street Journal, between 2004 and 2012, the NYPD made about 4.4 million stops as part of the program. More than 80 percent of those stopped were either black or Hispanic, and about 90 percent weren't charged with a crime.
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