Judge Rules Stop-and-Frisk Unconstitutional; Bloomberg Still Defends It

On Monday, a U.S. federal judge found the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional. Judge Shira Scheindlin called Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s signature crime-fighting strategy of the past decade a “policy of indirect racial profiling.” Though the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy originated in the 1970s, the tactic has been escalated since Bloomberg became mayor in 2002 and installed Ray Kelly as police commissioner. In that time, 5 million New Yorkers—overwhelmingly minorities—have been stopped on the street for on-the-spot searches and interrogations by the NYPD. In just the past four years, 87 percent of those stopped were black or Latino, and in 2011, there were more stops of young black men than the total number of young black men living in the city. Nine out of 10 people stopped and frisked are not guilty of any criminal activity, according to the NYPD’s own reports. As the New York Times reports: In her 195-page decision, Judge Scheindlin concluded that the stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause… The judge found that for much of the last decade, patrol officers had stopped innocent people without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Bloomberg and Kelly have staunchly defended stop-and-frisk. In March, the mayor went so far as to say, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” In the wake of Monday’s ruling—which calls for federal monitoring of stop-and-frisk, but stops short of eliminating the policy—Bloomberg said the city would appeal and warned that Judge Scheindlin’s decision would lead to more crime and violence, saying, “I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids.” The ruling comes just weeks after the controversial acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a case that drew national attention to issues of racial profiling. Bloomberg will term out of office at the end of the year, and three of the Democratic candidates vying for mayor in the upcoming elections—Christine Quinn, Bill Thompson and Bill de Blasio—have issued statements applauding the judge’s decision. It is unclear how the ruling will affect NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly’s bid for Homeland Security Secretary. President Obama is reportedly considering Kelly for the job, recently saying that Kelly has done an “extraordinary” job in New York.