Court blocks stop-and-frisk ruling
A federal appeals court blocked a judge’s order requiring changes to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program. The judge has also been removed from the case.
In August, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the city had violated the Constitution by executing its stop-and-frisk policy.
The city appealed her findings and her remedial orders, including a decision to assign a monitor to help the police department changes its policy and training program associated with it. The appeals court said the judge needed to be removed from the case because she ran afoul of the code of conduct for U.S. judges by compromising the necessity for a judge to avoid the appearance of partiality in part because of a series of media interviews and public statements responding publicly to criticism of the court.
The judge had ruled that officers violated the civil rights of thousands of people by wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men with its stop-and frisk program. She appointed an outside monitor to oversee reforms in policies, training and supervision and ordered a pilot program to test body-worn cameras in some precincts where most stops occurred.
Stop-and-frisk has been practiced for years now, but New York has seen an increase in the measure under Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. In 2011, an all-time high of 684,330 were stopped and frisked, most of them being of black or Latino heritage.
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