(NEW YORK) MintPress — At last, some progress amidst the growing calls for increased oversight of the NYPD. A federal judge has finally approved a settlement in a class-action case charging that the police had unlawfully arrested as many as 22,000 people over a period of nearly 30 years under laws that had long been declared unconstitutional.
In 2010, a federal judge held New York City in contempt of court for “obstinance and uncooperativeness,” ruling that the NYPD, beginning in 1983, had continued to make arrests for loitering to panhandle or to search for a sex partner and for waiting in a bus or train station. Federal and state courts had struck down those laws, between 1983 and 1993, as violating First Amendment rights.
Now, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of U.S. District Court in Manhattan has awarded the victims a $15 million payment by the city, which could lead to individual payments of as much as $5,000, and a promise that officials will help the courts vacate and seal all convictions stemming from the arrests.
“The NYPD used these void laws over the past few decades to target people based on poverty, race and sexual orientation,” said J. McGregor Smyth, an attorney from the Bronx Defenders, a non-profit organization providing free legal help to residents of that borough who are charged with crimes. “We are happy that the city has finally taken responsibilities for these abuses.”
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Widespread abuse of power
Following the judge’s ruling, the New York City Law Department issued a statement saying that the NYPD was “committed to maintaining its policy against enforcing unconstitutional statues.”
Lawyers who helped file the case claimed that the police hierarchy was not aggressive enough in training officers or challenging the police culture, issues which have also arisen with regard to the NYPD’s surveillance of minorities, practice of stopping and frisking, and conduct of low-level narcotics operations.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has just ordered an internal review of all street narcotic enforcement units after last week’s fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager in the Bronx. The officer who killed 18-year-old Ramarley Graham was part of a team of policemen who stake out street locations frequented by drug dealers. These teams exist in dozens of precincts around the city.
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Wrongful drug arrests
Another issue with NYPD narcotics officers has been the widespread practice of planting drugs on suspects in order to boost arrest numbers. A former New York City narcotics detective who was caught doing just that testified in court last October that “It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators.”
The Drug Policy Alliance, a group that promotes alternatives to the war on drugs, issued a statement calling the case against the officers indicative of larger, systematic failures.
“One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people,” it said. “The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices.”
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Burden on the public
The bottom line for taxpayers: Both the $15,000,000 that will be paid to the claimants who were illegally arrested for loitering and all of the money that the City of New York pays to drug suspects it wrongfully arrests comes out of their own pockets.
Last year, the New York City comptroller’s office reported that there were 8,104 claims against the NYPD, which it called a “historical high amount.” The report found that the number of claims against the NYPD rose by 43 percent over the last five years. Most of these will get settled out of court. In 2010, the city paid out $561 million in lawsuits overall.
The problem has become so bad that a slew of law firms with websites like falsearrestlawsuit.com have sprung up to take advantage of it.
Source: MintPress
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