Judge stops ‘stop-and-frisk’

There has never been much of a difference between with the New Jersey State Police did in the 1990s — racially profiling minority drivers on the Turnpike, which resulted in court oversight of the state cops — and what Bloomberg’s police were doing with New York’s stop-and-frisk program. Even the arguments that Bloomberg and the police made in defending stop-and-frisk sounded eerily like those made by New Jersey officials when they defended profiling practices.

It is good to see that the courts, at least in New York, are skeptical of the arguments.

In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that on hundreds of thousands of occasions since 2004, the police have systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. She further found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops.

In the words of The New York Times, the city — and not just police officers — were responsible for “a battery of constitutional violations” and that stop-and-frisk amounted to a “checkpoint-style policing tactic, with the intent of deterring minorities from carrying guns on the street.”

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet