An
element of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk
practice was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge on Tuesday, a ruling
that may have broad implications for the city’s widespread use of police stops
as a crime-fighting tactic.
The decision, the first federal ruling to find that the
practice under the Bloomberg administration violates the Fourth Amendment
protection against unreasonable search and seizure, focused on police stops
conducted in front of several thousand private residential buildings in the
Bronx enrolled in the Trespass Affidavit Program. Property managers in that
program have asked the police to patrol their buildings and to arrest
trespassers.
But the judge, Shira
A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said officers
were routinely stopping people outside the buildings without reasonable
suspicion that they were trespassing.
“While it may be difficult to say where, precisely, to
draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters,
such a line exists, and the N.Y.P.D. has systematically crossed it when making
trespass stops outside TAP buildings in the Bronx,” Judge Scheindlin ruled.
Judge Scheindlin is presiding over three significant
stop-and-frisk lawsuits that could fundamentally change New York City’s
strategy for preventing street crimes. While the judge’s decision applies to
only one of the lawsuits, Ligon v. the City of New York, the cases share some
core constitutional issues.
Much of the criticism in the ruling is directed at the
training the Police Department provides officers, which Judge Scheindlin
suggested sidesteps the Fourth Amendment.
The evidence in this case, she found, “strengthens the
conclusion that the N.Y.P.D.’s inaccurate training has taught officers the
following lesson: Stop and question first, develop reasonable suspicion later.”
Christopher T. Dunn, a lawyer for the New York Civil
Liberties Union, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs, said, “If New
York City has any sense, it will use this ruling as an opportunity to start a
wholesale reform of stop and frisk.”
In the decision released on Tuesday, the judge ordered
the police “to cease performing trespass stops” outside the private buildings
in the program unless officers have reasonable suspicion, a legal standard that
requires officers to be acting on more than just a hunch.
The fact that a person was merely seen entering or
leaving a building was not enough to permit the police to stop someone, “even
if the building is located in a high-crime area, and regardless of the time of
day,” the judge ruled. Nor was it enough for an officer to conduct a stop
simply because the officer had observed the person move furtively, Judge
Scheindlin said. (The forms that the police fill out after each street stop
offer “furtive” movements as a basis for the stop.)
The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, criticized the
ruling, contending that the program, also known as Clean Halls, gave residents
of the Bronx buildings “a modicum of safety for less prosperous tenants. Their
landlords explicitly requested this extra level of protection.”
“Today’s decision unnecessarily interferes with the
department’s efforts to use all of the crime-fighting tools necessary to keep
Clean Halls buildings safe and secure,” he added.
Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said
the program led to several recent arrests for illegal guns. On Dec. 16, the
police arrested a man with a handgun on the rooftop of a residential building
in the Bronx.
On Nov. 21, officers recovered a handgun after observing
the gun’s butt protruding from a man’s jacket pocket as they patrolled a
fourth-floor hallway in a building on East 220th Street.
Judge
Scheindlin called for a hearing to discuss possible remedies to the issues she
raised. At that hearing, she said, she will consider requiring the Police
Department to create a formal written policy “specifying the limited
circumstances in which it is legally permissible to stop a person outside a TAP
building on a suspicion of trespass,” revise the training of officers and alter
some of the training literature and videos used to teach officers how to
conduct lawful stops.
The
ruling followed a seven-day hearing in October during which nine black and
Latino residents testified about being stopped while leaving their homes or
visiting friends and relatives as guests. With testimony by plaintiffs and
police witnesses, it was the first hearing of its type in any of the three
stop-and-frisk cases before Judge Scheindlin, and the testimony evidently
shaped her conclusions.
“Because any member of the public could conceivably find
herself outside a TAP building in the Bronx, the public at large has a liberty
and dignity interest in bringing an end to the practice of unconstitutional stops
at issue in this case,” the judge wrote.
“For those of us who do not fear being stopped as we
approach or leave our own homes or those of our friends and families, it is
difficult to believe that residents of one of our boroughs live under such a
threat. In light of the evidence presented at the hearing, however, I am
compelled to conclude that this is the case.” The judge said she considered the
plaintiffs credible partly because of “the striking similarities” in their
experiences being stopped.
As a person exits a building, the ruling said, “the
police suddenly materialize, stop the person, demand identification, and
question the person about where he or she is coming from and what he or she is
doing.”
The decision continued: “Attempts at explanation are met
with hostility; especially if the person is a young black man, he is frisked,
which often involves an invasive search of his pockets; in some cases the
officers then detain the person in a police van.”
Judge Scheindlin also expressed concern over a department
training video that she said incorrectly characterized what constituted an
actual police stop. In the video, a uniformed narrator states “Usually just
verbal commands such as ‘Stop! Police!’ will not constitute a seizure.”
The
narrator explains that the encounter usually qualifies as an actual stop only
if the officer takes further steps such as physically subduing a suspect,
pointing a gun at him, or blocking his path. “This misstates the law,” Judge
Scheindlin said of the video, which has been shown to most of the patrol force.