Five residents of the Bronx borough of New York City have filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department (NYPD) for conducting what plaintiffs say are discriminatory searches specifically against immigrants from the Caribbean.
It’s part of the growing public backlash against “stop-and-frisk,” a policy that allows officers to stop citizens and search their person for weapons, drugs and other illegal items.
“This argument that it’s about going after, preventing crime, getting crimes off the street is a lie by [the NYPD’s] own data,” community organizer and activist Noche Diaz said.
Since enacted as police policy in 2002, the NYPD has conducted 5 million searches — 84 percent of which have targeted young African-American and Latino residents. Nearly nine out of 10 people stopped have been completely innocent, causing concern among civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The plaintiffs, all immigrants from the Caribbean, believe their case is part of a broader police trend whereby police disproportionately stop and question people of color.
The lawsuit names New York City, the NYPD and several officers and supervisors as defendants. It was filed by the Bronx Defenders, which represents low-income defendants.
The case stems from drug convictions that the men believe should have resulted in a minor fine but in reality led to misdemeanor offenses.
Because the men were stopped, frisked and arrested for possession of marijuana in public view, the men could face up to three months in jail under Section 221.10 of the New York Penal Code.
First-time drug offenses of this kind generally carry just a $100 crime if the marijuana was found outside the public view. Critics of the NYPD say this practice, described as “manufactured misdemeanors” (where police deliberately reveal marijuana in public view) is rampant as a result of the stop-and-frisk policy.
Dissent has begun to grow within the ranks of the NYPD as well, where some officers are speaking out against what they see as a racist policy that does little to reduce crime.
“I was extremely bothered by what I was seeing out there,” said NYPD officer Adhyl Polanco during testimony last month. “The racial profiling, the arresting people for no reason, being called to scenes [where] I did not observe a violation and being forced to write a summons that I didn’t observe.” Polanco is testifying as part of a separate, ongoing lawsuit challenging stop-and-frisk.
Recent reports show that with fewer stop-and-frisks conducted in the first three months of 2013, violent crime, including murder, has actually decreased. With the number of random stop-and-frisks down 51 percent in those first months of 2013, murder rates have plummeted 30 percent and overall crime has dropped 2.7 percent, according to NYPD statistics.
Those internal statistics show that the NYPD conducted 99,788 street searches between Jan. 1 and March 31, compared with 203,500 stops for the same period in 2013, as reported by CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.