Federal judge: NYPD stop-and-frisk policy violates 4th, 14th Amendments (updated)

on how to reform stop-and-frisk.

The Supreme Court had some time ago ruled that stop-and-frisks were constitutionally permissible under certain conditions, and Judge Scheindlin emphasized that she was “not ordering an end to the practice.” She said, however, that changes were needed to ensure that the street stops were conducted 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 NYPD officers were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop.

“Blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites,” she wrote.

She found that officers, in their zeal to identify concealed weapons, sometimes stopped people on the grounds that the officer observed a bulge in the person’s pocket; often it turned out that the bulge was caused not by a gun but by a wallet.

“The outline of a commonly carried object such as a wallet or cellphone does not justify a stop or frisk, nor does feeling such an object during a frisk justify a search,” she ruled.

She emphasized what she called the “human toll of unconstitutional stops,” noting that some of the plaintiffs testified that their encounters with the police left them feeling that they did not belong in certain areas of the cities. She characterized each stop as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.”

“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” the judge wrote. During police stops, she found, blacks and Hispanics “were more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband.”

The Times notes that the ruling, in Floyd v. City of New York, follows a two-month nonjury trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan earlier this year over the department’s stop-and-frisk practices.

Judge Scheindlin heard testimony from about a dozen black or biracial men and a woman who described being stopped, and she heard from statistical experts who offered their conclusions based on police paperwork describing some 4.43 million stops between 2004 and mid-2012.

Blacks and Hispanics constituted 88 percent of those stopped, a disparity the NYPD has explained by saying that it mirrored the disproportionate percentage of crimes committed by young minority men.

Judge Scheindlin, using harsh language, dismissed this rationale.

“This might be a valid comparison if the people stopped were criminals,” Judge Scheindlin wrote, explaining that there was significant evidence that the people being stopped were not criminals. “To the contrary, nearly 90 percent of the people stopped are released without the officer finding any basis for a summons or arrest.”

Rather, Judge Scheindlin found, the city had a “policy of targeting expressly identified racial groups for stops in general.”

“Targeting young black and Hispanic men for stops based on the alleged criminal conduct of other young black or Hispanic men violates bedrock principles of equality,” Judge Scheindlin ruled, finding that the Police Department’s practices violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

The judge ruled that the effectiveness of “stop and frisk” was irrelevant.

“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 ruling said.

Several black and Hispanic men who were named as plaintiffs gathered at a CCR press conference to hear the verdict. Some were in tears as they heard the ruling.

“When I got the call this morning the first thing I did was cry,” said David Ourlicht, 25, who was stopped at St. John’s University in Queens in 2008, ostensibly for walking in a suspicious way with a bulge under his winter clothing.

“It’s a really good picture of what’s going on in society,” said Ourlicht, who is a mixed race man of black and white heritage.