New York – The verdict is a setback for New York’s longtime Mayor Michael Bloomberg: A US federal court has ruled a key crime-fighting practice in New York as unconstitutional. The arbitrary stopping and searching of people on the streets of the city, known as “stop and frisk” (“stop and search”), violate the rights of those affected, judged federal judge Shira Scheindlin.
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The excessively applied practice violates the constitutional right to protection against unfounded searches and the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment before the law, said Scheindlin. The judge did not demand a complete ending of “stop and frisk”. However, they ordered the appointment of an independent observer. This should check whether the police change their aggressive approach and whether the searches are constitutional.
Mayor Bloomberg said the required surveillance put the city’s 35,000 uniformed police officers “under administration”. He announced that he would appeal the judgment. After all, the “stop and frisk” strategy is a “central deterrent”, through which around 8,000 weapons have been withdrawn from circulation in the past ten years. “There’s no question that stopping, questioning, and searching saved countless lives,” said Bloomberg.
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“This is a form of race manhunt”
Screening and searching those not of immediate suspicion is one of the most important measures the New York authorities took to contain the escalating violence in the metropolis in the 1980s and early 1990s. The average number of murders a day in the city fell from six in 1990 to around one a day.
The police stopped people on the street to search them for weapons or drugs. Federal law allows this to happen if someone acts suspiciously. But according to the judge, the New York Police Department has far exceeded the limits.
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Scheindlin noted that innocent people had been systematically stopped and searched for years without any grounds for suspicion. The judge complained that the New York police had “an unwritten rule of thumb to stop ‘the right people'”. In practice, officials would be encouraged to screen young black and Hispanic men in particular. “This is a form of race manhunt,” criticized Scheindlin.
In fact, of the estimated 4.4 million “stop and frisk” cases between January 2004 and January 2012, 52 percent were black, 31 percent of those affected were Hispanic and only 10 percent were white. The New York civil rights group Center for Constitutional Rights had filed a complaint against the practice. She described the verdict as a “victory for all New Yorkers”.
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