Free Republic

Fifty years from now, when college students read about the history of America’s criminal-justice system, August 12, 2013 may turn out to be one of those watershed moments: a day when America took a hard look at the human costs of its criminal-justice policies — and began to reverse course. This morning, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin delivered her decision in Floyd, et. al. vs. the City of New York, in which she blasted the NYPD’s practice of stopping-and-frisking people and ordered the appointment of an independent monitor. Meanwhile, in California, Attorney General Eric Holder announced this afternoon that the Justice...

A federal court handed a big defeat to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York Police Department today, ruling that the controversial “stop and frisk� program infringed on constitutional rights. Judge Shira Scheindlin appointed a federal monitor to oversee the NYPD and “reform� the practice, although that might prove impossible: A federal judge appointed an independent monitor Monday to oversee changes to the New York Police Department’s contentious policy known as stop, question and frisk, a significant judicial rebuke for what the mayor and police commissioner have defended as a life-saving, crime-fighting tool. …Four men had sued saying they were...

On the defense after the City Council passed a pair of bills designed to curb the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic and other alleged abuses, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that his critics had it backwards when they accuse the police of stopping too many black and Latino men. In fact, he bluntly declared the opposite to be true if viewed through a lens of who commits murders. “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” Mr. Bloomberg argued during his Friday morning WOR radio show with John Gambling. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they say....

It comes as no surprise that controversy would ride the coattails of the news yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder may suggest a federal monitor over the NYPD should stop-and-frisk be deemed unconstitutional in Floyd v. New York. Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly freaked out in a teleconference with Holder the other day when they heard about the Justice Department's proposal. And yesterday, at an unrelated press conference, the m ayor made his opposition to the proposal absolutely, 100 percent clear. Contrary to an inspector general--a City Council proposal in the Community Safety Act currently making its way through...

Attorney General Eric Holder's office has filed a brief seeking a federal NYPD monitor in the event the court finds the stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional. IN A STUNNING MOVE sure to send daggers through 1 Police Plaza and City Hall, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder weighed in at the last minute on the federal stop-and-frisk trial, tossing his support behind a federal monitor for the NYPD. Disputing outright the objections of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and City Hall, Holder’s office filed an eleventh-hour brief that could lead to a monitor if the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy is deemed unconstitutional. The last day...

New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is in hot water after attempting to defend the city’s stop-and-frisk policy by claiming that African-Americans are actually “understopped.” In an interview with ABC’s Nightline, Kelly defended the NYPD’s use of the tactic, rejecting the notion that stop-and-frisk is directed disproportionately at New York’s African-American and Latino population. “The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color,” Kelly told “Nightline” co-anchor Bill Weir on Wednesday. “About 70 percent to 75 percent of the people described as committing violent crimes -- assault, robbery, shootings, grand larceny -- are described as being African-American. “...

A fiendishly deceptive article about the New York Police Department in the New York Times has set back the cause of public safety not just in New York but nationally. A front-page story on Friday twisted a police commander’s exhortation to an underperforming officer to work harder against crime into an injunction to target blacks on the basis of race. The commander’s statements were captured on a tape secretly recorded by the officer and replayed last Thursday during a federal racial-profiling trial directed against the New York Police Department’s stop, question, and frisk policy. The officer had already joined the...

Telly Hudgins has been stopped and frisked by the police too many times to count in the Brownsville, New York, public housing project where he lives. One occasion sticks in his memory. "I had my pajamas on and my slippers on and I'm emptying my garbage" at the trash chute. "They asked me for ID to prove I lived there. Who walks around in their pajamas with ID?" asked the black, 35-year-old counselor for the mentally handicapped. He says he complained about the search and was issued a summons for disorderly conduct. Deborah Richardson, 60, a black postal worker, has...

As a New Yorker, I am heartbroken by the death of Police Officer Peter Figoski, and as a black woman, I am outraged by the hypocrisy of elected officials like City Councilman Jumaane Williams, Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and others who consistently critique the NYPD and oppose its stop-and-frisk policies. Have Williams, Jeffries and everyone else expressed their grief in the wake of the Figoski killing? Yes. But that doesn’t change the fact that these politicians and their allies never miss a chance to attack cops for their supposedly discriminatory targeting of black youth. Meanwhile, every day I read the paper...

How Profiling Saved My LifeBy Nicholas StixToogood Reports | December 16, 2003 Gettin’ PaidIt was just after 9 p.m. on a school night, and Dennis, Steve, Michael, maybe another guy and myself were on the corner, by the parking garage of a fancy apartment building a block away from our slummy neighborhood. Dennis, the ringleader was 14, Steve was 15, I was 13 and Michael was 12.Along comes an unmarked car, and Det. Kevan and some other plainclothes guys jump out, and hassle us. Stupid Det. Kevan, the jerk. Father of Jimmy, the bully, who was my age, and Jimmy’s...