Posts Tagged ‘Shira Scheindlin’






















In my last post, I discussed the legal basis for the court’s decision in Floyd v. New York City, in which the judge found that the NYPD’s stop and frisk program violated the Constitution.  In this post, I’ll discuss the remedies: the changes the judge has ordered the NYPD to make.  (All quotes are from the court’s separate “Remedies Opinion.”)

To start: the host of a public radio show I did on Tuesday asked whether the court has the power to order these changes.  The answer is yes.  Having found that the NYPD violated the Constitution, the court has the power to order the court to do what is necessary to fix its practices to eliminate the violation.  The judge was actually quite circumspect, carefully outlining the limits of her own reach.

So what remedies did she order?  Here are the most important ones.

First, she appointed an independent monitor to help create the changes in how officers use stops and frisks, and to oversee the implementation of these changes.  Independent monitors are common in negotiated settlements of police misconduct cases brought by the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and they are also used in some cases in which private plaintiffs have sued police departments (e.g., the Philadelphia case on stops and frisks).

Second, she mandated some of the areas that must be changed: “policies, training, supervision, monitoring, and discipline regarding stop and frisk.”  She was especially adamant that policies on certain particular matters undergo an overhaul:  training regarding what constitutes the necessary reasonable suspicion to perform a stop and frisk; the targeting of “the right people” for stops (which she said led to racial profiling); and the use of “performance goals.” She also ordered that the documentation and record keeping for stops and frisk must undergo specific changes.

Third, the judge ordered the Department to launch pilot programs for “body-worn cameras” that would record stop and frisk encounters.  This was a surprise to many, because the subject came up only peripherally in the trial and the technology involved is relatively new.  These video recording systems, which record an officer’s-eye view of the interaction between citizen and police officer, will create “a contemporaneous, objective record of stops and frisks, allowing for the review of officer conduct by supervisors and the courts.”  For those interested in this promising technology, take a look at my brief article, “Picture This:  Body Worn Video Devices (‘Head Cams’) as Tools for Ensuring Fourth Amendment Compliance by Police,” published in 2010 in volume 43, issue 1 of the Texas Tech Law Review.

Fourth, the judge prescribed a “joint remedial process” in which there would be “community input” into the remedies, modeled on the Collaborative Agreement used in Cincinnati.

Those are the general outlines.  The City and the NYPD have pledged to appeal, but it is questionable whether an appeal could even get started before Mayor Bloomberg leaves office, bringing new leadership to the city and very likely to the police department too.  Given the positions of the leading candidates on stop and frisk, the next mayor is likely to take a different approach to the issue, and thus to the court decision.

In a future post, I will offer some reflections on what the impact of the decision is likely to be beyond New York.


On August 12, a U.S. federal judge found that the New York Police Department  had systematically violated the U.S. Constitution in the way it performed stops and frisks.  Judge Shira Scheindlin’s 198-page opinion in the case, Floyd v. New York, is here.

I’ve discussed the case in earlier posts (here and here), so an explanation of the judge’s opinion is important.  Today, I’m going to talk about what the judge actually said in her opinion; there’s already a lot of misinformation out there.  Tomorrow, I’ll discuss the remedies the judge has required: the actions that NYPD will have to take to bring itself into compliance with the law.

First, the decision does not “outlaw” stop and frisk; it does not stop the NYPD from using this long-established tactic.  The judge said, correctly, that stop and frisk is a legal and constitutional tactic that police may use; the U.S. Supreme Court said so in 1968, in Terry v. Ohio.  But, the judge said, the police must obey some basic constitutional rules when they do so.   That, she said, was the problem: the NYPD was using stop and frisk unconstitutionally, in violation of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, by stopping people without the required reasonable suspicion: a very small amount of fact-based evidence pertaining to the individual person, but something the police lacked in many tens of thousands of these encounters.  In that respect, the judge ruled, the NYPD “has a policy or custom of violating the Constitution by making unlawful stops and conducting unlawful frisks” (p. 3).

Second, the judge made clear that she was not ruling on how effective the use of stop and frisk may or may not have been in fighting crime, either standing alone or in comparison with other police tactics for fighting crime.  (See, e.g.,  p. 2), Rather, she said, she was ruling on whether the way stop and frisk had been used squared with the Constitution.

Third, the judge found that the way that stop and frisk was practiced by the NYPD was racially skewed against Black and Latino New Yorkers, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  This finding has grabbed the most headlines, because the judge called it “a form of racial profiling.”  This led to outraged reaction by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly (transcript here), among others.  But the judge’s reasoning on this point, found in summary form on pp. 10 and 11 of the opinion, is not actually the stuff of controversy or bombshells; it comes directly from the testimony she heard:

…[T]he evidence at trial revealed that the NYPD has an unwritten policy of targeting “the right people” for stops. In practice, the policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints…While a person’s race may be important if it fits the description of a particular crime suspect, it is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group are criminals. The Equal Protection Clause does not permit race-based suspicion.

In conclusion, the judge said, the NYPD violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution not by doing stops and frisks, but by doing them in an unconstitutional manner over a period of years, despite being on notice that there were constitutional problems, and these practices “were sufficiently widespread as to have the force of law.”

That’s the legal and constitutional basis for the judge’s decision that the time has come to reform the use of stop and frisk in New York.  In my next post, I will discuss how the judge will require that reform to take place.


On Monday, May 20, Judge Shira Scheindlin of New York heard final arguments in a trial about stops and frisks by the New York Police Department (NYPD).  The Center for Constitutional Rights and a number of individuals has sued the NYPD.  They allege that the NYPD has used stops and frisks for the last ten years in violation of 1) the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures,  and 2) the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection of the laws, because stops and frisks have overwhelmingly targeted racial minorities — chiefly black and Latino men.   The judge’s decision may not  come for some months.  I discussed the case on NPR’s Tell Me More on May 21 (here) along with Delores Jones-Brown of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Here’s a short course on stop and frisk in American law, codified by the U.S. Supreme Court’s case of Terry v. Ohio (1968).  Generally, an arrest or a search requires that police have probable cause to believe that the suspect is involved in a crime.  Probable cause is less evidence than “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” and less evidence than “more probable than not” (the usual 50.1% of evidence required to win a civil case in the U.S.).  A stop and frisk is less intrusive than a traditional arrest or search: it is a temporary detention (stop) and a pat down of the outer clothing for weapons (frisk).  So it requires only reasonable, fact-based suspicion — an amount of evidence less than probable cause.  To use the Supreme Court’s terminology, an officer may perform a stop when he/she has reasonable suspicion that crime is afoot and that the suspect is or was involved; the officer may also perform a frisk when he/she has reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed.  Reasonable suspicion is a very low standard of evidence, but it is enough for stop and frisk because the stop is supposed to be brief and temporary, and the frisk is cursory and only for weapons, not a general search for evidence.

In 2002, the NYPD’s own statistics showed that officers performed 97,000 stops and frisks; by 2011, the number had increased to about 700,000.  (You can access the NYPD’s  statistics here.) Crime was already at historic lows in 2002 and is even lower now.  The NYPD claims that the continued drop in crime shows the effectiveness of its intensive use of stops and frisks, even though only about ten percent of these actions yielded any contraband or resulted in an arrest.  Over the same period, roughly 88 percent of those stopped and frisked were black and Latino men, leading to charges that the NYPD stop and frisk program was a form of racial profiling.

Judge Scheindlin’s comments during the final arguments on May 20 lead me to think that she will decide that the stop and frisk activity of the NYPD violates the Fourth Amendment requirement of reasonable suspicion.  She said she thought that getting results in only about ten percent of the cases — and finding guns (the objective of the NYPD’s stop and frisk activity) in far fewer cases than that — showed that the police were acting without even enough evidence to meet the very low standard of reasonable suspicion.  “A lot of people are being frisked or searched on suspicion of having a gun and nobody has a gun…[T]he suspicion turns out to be wrong in most of the cases.”  Proving that the racial skew in the statistics is racial profiling is more difficult, requiring both convincing statistical evidence and evidence of actions by the NYPD that target racial or ethnic minorities.

What do you think?   I’ll be keeping you posted.