Today a federal judge ruled that the New York Police Department's "stop and frisk" program violates both the Fourth and 14th amendments. Responding to a class action lawsuit by black and Hispanic targets of the NYPD's street stops, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin concluded that police commonly detain, question, and pat down New Yorkers without the "reasonable suspicion" the Supreme Court has said the Fourth Amendment requires. She also found, based on data showing who is stopped and what happens afterward, that cops decide who is suspicious based partly on race, thereby violating the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
Scheindlin's analysis of data on 4.4 million stops made between January 2004 and June 2012 strongly suggests that reasonable suspicion is the exception rather than the rule. During this period, she notes, only 12 percent of people subjected to the "demeaning and humiliating" experience of being treated like a criminal were arrested or issued a summons. Even more striking, although police are supposed to frisk a subject only if they reasonably believe he is armed, 52 percent of these encounters included pat-downs, only 1.5 percent of which discovered a weapon. Even when officers reached into subjects' clothing after feeling what they thought was a weapon, they were right only 9 percent of the time.
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