 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2009) |
Daniels, et al. v. the City of New York was a class action lawsuit filed in 1999 against the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the City of New York, charging them with racial profiling and unlawful stop and frisk, and requesting the disbanding of the NYPD Street Crimes Unit.
In February 1999, the Amadou Diallo shooting brought increased attention to the issue of police brutality. NYPD records showed that in 1997 and 1998, 35,000 out of 45,000 stop-and-frisks did not result in an arrest. The statistics showed that 16 African Americans were stopped for every arrest made.
The Daniels et al. v. The City of New York et al. was brought to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) by Richie Perez of the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights during the aftermath of the Diallo shooting.
The defendants initially argued to dismiss the case, citing a 1983 Supreme Court decision, City of Los Angeles v. Lyons. The court denied the dismissal.
The court also denied the plaintiffs' Equal Protection clause claim, as they set a racial classification, stating that the Street Crimes Unit had a "policy, practice and/or custom of stopping and frisking [individuals] based solely on [their] race and/or national origin."
The City agreed to a settlement on December 12, 2003. [1]
The settlement required that the NYPD maintain a written anti-racial-profiling policy that complies with the U.S. and New York State Constitutions and is binding on all NYPD officers. The policy requires that officers who engage in stop-and-frisks be audited, and for their supervisors to determine whether, and to what extent, the act was due to reasonable suspicion, and whether it was being documented.
The audits were then to be given to the Center for Constitutional Rights on a quarterly basis. Furthermore, the NYPD was required to engage in public education efforts, which included joint public meetings with class members and representatives on its racial profiling policy, and workshops at approximately 50 highs on a student's rights when being frisked. [2]
Due to an increase in stop-and-frisks and non-compliance with the decree, the Center for Constitutional Rights later filed a new class action lawsuit, Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. [3]
In the early hours of February 4, 1999, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo was fired upon with 41 rounds and shot a total of 19 times by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers: Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Kenneth Boss. Carroll later claimed to have mistaken him for a rape suspect from one year earlier.
The Muslim Students Association, or Muslim Student Union, of the U.S. and Canada, also known as MSA National, is a religious organization dedicated to establishing and maintaining Islamic societies on college campuses in Canada and the United States. It serves to provide coordination and support for affiliated MSA chapters in colleges across North America. Established in 1963, the organization now has chapters in colleges across the continent, and is the precursor of the Islamic Society of North America and several other Islamic organizations. The Muslim Students Association has at times been the subject of scrutiny; for example, the New York Police Department (NYPD) targeted MSAs across several US college campuses for monitoring as part of their Muslim surveillance program.
A Terry stop in the United States allows the police to briefly detain a person based on reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion is a lower standard than probable cause which is needed for arrest. When police stop and search a pedestrian, this is commonly known as a stop and frisk. When police stop an automobile, this is known as a traffic stop. If the police stop a motor vehicle on minor infringements in order to investigate other suspected criminal activity, this is known as a pretextual stop. Additional rules apply to stops that occur on a bus.
The Handschu agreement is a set of guidelines that regulate police behavior in New York City with regard to political activity.
Shira A. Scheindlin is an American attorney and jurist who served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The Thomas More Law Center is a Christian, conservative, nonprofit, public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and active throughout the United States. According to the Thomas More Law Center website, its goals are to "preserve America's Judeo-Christian heritage, defend the religious freedom of Christians, restore time-honored moral and family values, protect the sanctity of human life, and promote a strong national defense and a free and sovereign United States of America."
The National Action Network (NAN) is a not-for-profit, civil rights organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton in New York City, New York, in early 1991. In a 2016 profile, Vanity Fair called Sharpton "arguably the country's most influential civil rights leader".
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a progressive non-profit legal advocacy organization based in New York City, New York, in the United States. It was founded in 1966 by Arthur Kinoy, William Kunstler and others particularly to support activists in the implementation of civil rights legislation and to achieve social justice.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, or simply the Lawyers' Committee, is a civil rights organization founded in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy.
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is a civil rights organization in the United States. Founded in November 1951 as the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, it is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization with nearly 50,000 members across New York State.
Throughout the history of the New York City Police Department, numerous instances of corruption, misconduct, and other allegations of such, have occurred. Over 12,000 cases have resulted in lawsuit settlements totaling over $400 million during a five-year period ending in 2014. In 2019, taxpayers funded $68,688,423 as the cost of misconduct lawsuits, a 76 percent increase over the previous year, including about $10 million paid out to two exonerated individuals who had been falsely convicted and imprisoned.
Adrian Schoolcraft is a former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer who secretly recorded police conversations from 2008 to 2009. He brought these tapes to NYPD investigators in October 2009 as evidence of corruption and wrongdoing within the department. The tapes were used as evidence of arrest quotas leading to police abuses such as wrongful arrests, and that emphasis on fighting crime sometimes resulted in under-reporting of crimes to artificially deflate CompStat numbers.
The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit civil rights organization in Newark, New Jersey, and an affiliate of the national American Civil Liberties Union. According to the ACLU-NJ's stated mission, the ACLU-NJ operates through litigation on behalf of individuals, lobbying in state and local legislatures, and community education.
The stop-question-and-frisk program, or stop-and-frisk, in New York City, is a New York City Police Department (NYPD) practice of temporarily detaining, questioning, and at times searching civilians and suspects on the street for weapons and other contraband. This is what is known in other places in the United States as the Terry stop. The rules for the policy are contained in the state's criminal procedure law section 140.50 and based on the decision of the US Supreme Court in the case of Terry v. Ohio.
Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., 959 F. Supp. 2d 540, is a set of cases addressing the class action lawsuit filed against the City of New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and named and unnamed New York City police officers ("Defendants"), alleging that defendants have implemented and sanctioned a policy, practice, and/or custom of unconstitutional stops and frisks by the New York Police Department ("NYPD") on the basis of race and/or national origin, in violation of Section 1983 of title forty-two of the United States Code, the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Constitution and laws of the State of New York.
Pedro Serrano is a New York Police Department officer who testified against the department in Floyd v. City of New York, a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights over the department's stop-and-frisk policies. He also made recordings of his superiors which suggested that the NYPD required arrest quotas from patrolmen which were used as evidence in the trial.
Racial profiling by law enforcement at the local, state, and federal levels, leads to discrimination against people in the African American, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latino, Arab, and Muslim communities of the United States. Examples of racial profiling are the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations, or the use of race to determine which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband. Besides such disproportionate searching of African Americans and members of other minority groups, other examples of racial profiling by law enforcement in the U.S. include the Trump-era China Initiative following racial profiling against Chinese American scientists; the targeting of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the investigation of illegal immigration; and the focus on Middle Eastern and South Asians present in the country in screenings for ties to Islamic terrorism. These suspicions may be held on the basis of belief that members of a target racial group commit crimes at a higher rate than that of other racial groups.
Peter Lenard Zimroth was an American legal scholar, public official and private practitioner. As New York City Corporation Counsel from 1987 to 1989, he unsuccessfully defended the constitutional purview of the New York City Board of Estimate in protracted litigation, culminating in its disestablishment under the Equal Protection Clause in 1989. In 2013, he became the court-appointed monitor of the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk policies and practices.
The Presidential Memorandum on Military Service by Transgender Individuals, officially the Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security, is the 27th presidential memorandum signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on August 25, 2017. The intent was to prevent transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, on the basis that they would be a financial burden due to sex reassignment procedures and associated costs. Federal courts delayed the implementation of this rule by issuing four injunctions. On January 22, 2019, however, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration's ban to take effect.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) actively monitors public activity in New York City, New York, United States. Historically, surveillance has been used by the NYPD for a range of purposes, including against crime, counter-terrorism, and also for nefarious or controversial subjects such as monitoring political demonstrations, activities, and protests, and even entire ethnic and religious groups.