The civil lawsuit filed by four male plaintiffs against the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy gained momentum Tuesday when an NYPD whistleblower testified he taped South Bronx station-house supervisors discussing quotas for stop-and-frisk arrests, according to the New York Daily News.
The NYPD has long denied quotas, despite several claims to the contrary by those who had worked inside the department.
Another witness to take the stand Tuesday was an emotional 24-year-old Nicholas Peart, a black man, who testified he was stopped by police while on the way to purchase milk for his family. Following the stop by the NYPD, Peart said officers took his keys, went into his apartment and took the shoes off his feet.
“I felt criminalized,” he told the court. “I felt degraded … I was going to the bodega. It was very upsetting.”
(MintPress) – A civil trial stemming from a class-action lawsuit filed against the New York Police Department (NYPD) over its constitutionally questionable stop-and-frisk policy began Monday, attracting an overflowing crowd of opponents upset over a practice deemed excessive and racially discriminatory.
While NYPD’s stop-and-frisk has been argued from a legal standpoint for years, the nature of this lawsuit is attaching victims to the argument against a policy that has plagued, primarily, Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.
Deon Dennis, David Ourlicht, Lalit Clarkson and David Floyd (now a medical school student), are the men behind the class-action lawsuit, claiming their rights were violated repeatedly by the NYPD without regard for the Fourteenth and Fourth Amendments.
Now, they not only seek a declaration that such policies violate the constitutional rights of all victims, but that an injunction mandating “significant changes in those policies” be implemented, according to the complaint.
“This case presents an issue of great public concern: the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos, compared to Whites, who become entangled in the criminal justice system,” the complaint states.
At the forefront of the lawsuit is a report published Dec. 12, 2012 by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which uses statistics from January 2010 to June 2012 to show the NYPD violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by disproportionately targeting Blacks and Latinos and the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
During that two-year period, Blacks and Latinos made up 84 percent of the stops by the NYPD — representing, proportionately, a much higher percentage of the overall ethnic makeup of the city. The method by which they were stopped also was questionable, as 95,000 documented stops “lacked reasonable, articulable suspicion,” according to the CCR report.
According to the complaint, between 2004 to 2009, more than 2.8 million incidents occurred— more than 50 percent stopped were Black, 30 percent were Latino and just 10 percent were White.
The official NYPD policy states that officers are permitted to briefly stop any individual if there is reasonable suspicion that the person is committing a crime. The NYPD claims this is the case, but the statistics say something completely different. Just 6 percent of all stops led to arrests, according to CCR statistics.
The trial
Monday’s trial started with testimony from two out of the 12 Black and Hispanic men set to testify that they were subjected to stop-and-frisk purely because of their race. Devin Almoner was one of those men. A son of a police officer, Almoner explained how he was thrown against an unmarked car and handcuffed when he was just 13 years old, according to a report by the Washington Post.
“It made me feel scared,” Almoner said in court. “I didn’t know what was going on.”
The Post reports criminologists and officers are set to testify in what’s expected to be a month-long trial. Adrian Schoolcraft, a former NYPD officer who was forcefully taken to a psych ward after he allegedly claimed he would not fulfill stop-and-frisk quotas, is also set to testify.
U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin, who is presiding over the case, has indicated concern in the past over stop-and-frisk, but does not have the authority to determine its legality, as previous rulings have determined it legal. The question up for debate now is whether the program is in need of reform.
According to the NYPD, that reform has already taken place — this, despite the numbers being put forth by the plaintiffs. Rather than attempting to discredit the statistics, the defense defended the actions of the NYPD, pointing for a need in extra parole in communities of color.
“The New York Police Department is fully committed to policing within the boundaries of the law,” City Attorney Heidi Grossman said, according to the Post. “Crime is not distributed evenly across the city.”
A ruling is expected within the next month.