In a stinging rebuke to the Bloomberg administration, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the New York City Police's "stop and frisk" crime-fighting tactics violate the constitutional rights of minorities, despite claims by the mayor and police commissioner that it has driven down rates of violent crime. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the police adopted a policy of "indirect racial profiling" by targeting racially defined groups for stops, resulting in the disproportionate, discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics, and that the city's highest officials "turned a blind eye" toward this result, she said. "No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life," Scheindlin wrote in her opinion. Police personnel felt or were aware of pressure to increase the number of stops when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002 and brought in Raymond Kelly to be NYPD Commissioner, the judge wrote. As a result, officers often frisked young minority men for weapons or searched their pockets for contraband before letting them go, in a violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment that protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, the judge said in a 195-page decision. read the rest of this story
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