The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices raise serious concerns over racial profiling, illegal stops, and privacy rights.The Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of laws abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.
Discriminatory and abusive policing in New York City remains a serious problem after decades of out-of-control policies and practices that are unaccountable to residents of the city. In 1994, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton adopted policing strategies based on the unproven and controversial broken windows theory, an ideologically-driven …show more content…
Yet, it has continued to dramatically expand. This has resulted in policing that undermines public safety and trust including biased stop-and-frisk abuses, unconstitutional searches, racially disparate marijuana arrests and summonses, discriminatory profiling and harassment, and the use of excessive force. These NYPD policies and practices often aggressively target and disproportionally impact communities of color, including young people, homeless people, LGBTQ people, people with cognitive and psychiatric disabilities, immigrants, women, and Muslim communities.
The abuses in daily police interactions that occur with impunity normalize a dangerous standard of disrespect within communities that leads to escalating abuse and violence. The lack of accountability for such abuses further undermines the public integrity, far too often leaving New Yorkers increasingly vulnerable to police abuse and violence and without safety in their own neighborhoods. Even in the extreme but far too common incidents when officers brutalize or unjustly kill New Yorkers, there is rarely meaningful and timely accountability by the …show more content…
Minorities were disproportionately targeted under policies that encouraged more police stops to combat crime, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote in a 195-page decision (PDF). “A police department may not target a racially defined group for stops in general—that is, for stops based on suspicions of general criminal wrongdoing—simply because members of that group appear frequently in the police department’s suspect data,” she wrote.
Scheindlin found violations of the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. As a remedy, the judge appointed lawyer Peter Zimroth of Arnold & Porter to monitor police conduct. He is a former corporation counsel for New York City and former chief assistant district attorney in