Judge rebukes NYC on stops

NEW YORK - The nation's largest police department illegally and systematically singled out large numbers of blacks and Hispanics under its stop-and-frisk policy, a federal judge ruled Monday while appointing an independent monitor to oversee major changes, including body cameras on some officers.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he would appeal the ruling, which was a stinging rebuke to a policy he and the New York Police Department have defended as a life-saving, crime-fighting tool that helped lead the city to historic crime lows. The legal outcome could affect how and whether other cities employ the tactic.

"The city's highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner," U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote in her ruling. "In their zeal to defend a policy that they believe to be effective, they have willfully ignored overwhelming proof that the policy of targeting 'the right people' is racially discriminatory."

Stop-and-frisk has been around for decades in some form, but recorded stops increased dramatically under the Bloomberg administration to an all-time high in 2011 of 684,330, mostly of black and Hispanic men. The lawsuit was filed in 2004 by four men, all minorities, and became a class-action case.

About half the people who are stopped are subject only to questioning. Only 10 percent of all stops result in arrest, and a weapon is recovered a small fraction of the time.

Scheindlin noted that she was not putting an end to the practice, which is constitutional, but was reforming the way the NYPD implemented its stops.

She determined at least 200,000 stops were made without reasonable suspicion, the necessary legal benchmark, lower than the standard of probable cause needed to justify an arrest. She said that rank-and-file officers were pressured by superiors to make stops - and that high-ranking police officials ignored mounting evidence that bad stops were being made.

"The city and its highest officials believe that blacks and Hispanics should be stopped at the same rate as their proportion of the local criminal suspect population," she wrote. "But this reasoning is flawed because the stopped population is overwhelmingly innocent - not criminal."

She also cited violations of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Scheindlin did not give many specifics for how to correct such practices but directed the monitor to develop reforms to policies, training, supervision, and discipline with input from the communities most affected. She also ordered a pilot program in which officers test body-worn cameras in the one precinct per borough where most stops occurred. The idea came up inadvertently during testimony, but Scheindlin seized on it as a way to provide objective records of the encounters.

Scheindlin appointed the city's former lead attorney, Peter L. Zimroth, previously a chief assistant district attorney, as the monitor. He said he realized the issue was difficult. "It's very important to get it right. And to the extent I can help with that, I want to," he said.

At a news conference, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly blasted the ruling, saying the judge ignored historic crime lows and displayed a "disturbing disregard" for the "good intentions" of police officers who do not racially profile.

"There is just no question that stop, question, frisk has saved countless lives, and most of those lives saved have been black and Hispanic young men," Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg said police have done exactly what the courts and constitution allow to keep the city safe. The judge simply does not understand "how policing works," he said, and the result could be a return to the days of crime and mayhem from the 1980s and 1990 - when murders hit an all-time high of 2,245.

Scheindlin presided over a 10-week bench trial this year that included testimony from NYPD brass and a dozen people - 11 men and one woman - who said they were wrongly stopped because of their race. She found that nine of the 19 stops discussed in court were unconstitutional, and that an additional five stops included wrongful frisking.

A similar legal challenge in Philadelphia, filed by the local lawyers and the state chapter of the ACLU, led to a June 2011 consent decree in which the city agreed to institute new policies, retrain its officers, and endure ongoing monitoring.

In a report to U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell last spring on the monitoring, the ACLU accused the police of still committing "an intolerably high" level of civil rights abuses through its stop-and-frisk program. But an attorney for the ACLU said there have been improvements. "We haven't always agreed with the city concerning the rate of improvement in guaranteeing constitutional practices, but we are making progress," said the lawyer, Mary Catherine Roper.