Good news — a U.S. district court has ruled that New York’s Stop and Frisk program, which overwhelmingly targeted minorities, violates civil rights, is racially discriminatory, and violates the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department deliberately violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of New Yorkers with its contentious stop-and-frisk policy, and an independent monitor is needed to oversee major changes, a federal judge ruled Monday in a stinging rebuke for what the mayor and police commissioner have defended as a life-saving, crime-fighting tool. [...]
“The city’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner,” she wrote. “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.”
For years, police brass had been warned that officers were violating rights, but they nevertheless maintained and escalated “policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread Fourth Amendment violations,” Scheindlin wrote in a lengthy opinion.
She also cited violations of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
“Far too many people in New York City have been deprived of this basic freedom far too often,” she said. “The NYPD’s practice of making stops that lack individualized reasonable suspicion has been so pervasive and persistent as to become not only a part of the NYPD’s standard operating procedure, but a fact of daily life in some New York City neighborhoods.”
When Mayor Bloomberg was confronted over stop and frisk several months ago, he brazenly asserted that it could be argued that they stop white people too often and don’t stop minorities enough.
An “independent monitor” will oversee reform of the program, which means we haven’t heard the last of this or Bloomberg’s claims that “math” proves him right.
Eugenicists also believe math proves them right. Just sayin’.