Lawyers Against Stop and Frisk
On April 18, 2013 NYC Public Defenders, Attorneys Call for End to Illegal, Discriminatory Policing and Stop & Frisk Practices outside Stop-and-Frisk Trial
Group expresses support for federal lawsuit, stresses need for reforms
Today, lawyers from all over New York City came to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Lower Manhattan to show their support for the Floyd plaintiff’s challenging the NYPD’s unconstitutional stop-and -frisk policing practices in a class-action lawsuit. The attorneys called for an end to illegal discriminatory policing and expressed support for the Community Safety Act reforms that would protect New Yorkers from being profiled and unlawfully searched by police, while increasing accountability and transparency for the police department.
“The NYPD acts with a culture of impunity,” said Jason E. Starr, Esq. “This undermines the ability of the community to trust and respect the Police Department, making all New Yorkers less safe. How much longer does this need to go on? It is time for New York City and the Bloomberg administration to admit that it has to a stop-and-frisk problem, to settle it’s stop-and-frisk cases, and to agree to serious reforms, including passage of the Community Safety Act.” Everyday, both criminal and civil lawyers represent clients who have been unlawfully stopped, harassed, searched, and arrested b the NYPD throughout New York City. Many lawyers have themselves been the targets of the same wrongheaded policing that has been on trial in Federal court for weeks.
“One would expect, or at least imagine, that in a city with more than 685,000 stop-and-frisks per year, there would be innumerable suppression hearings with police officers called under oath about they did and why they did it,” said Steve Zeidman, a Clinical Professor at CUNY School of Law. “This is precisely the role imagined for the criminal court by the U.S. Supreme Court when it established the exclusionary rule for Fourth Amendment violations. However, suppression hearings in the criminal court are few and far between. Just as the criminal court’s longstanding and overarching emphasis on efficiency and plea bargains trumps trials and meaningful determinations of guilt or innocence, it also ignores, if not abhors, suppression hearings and careful examinations of the legality of everyday police conduct on the street.”
Read: Floyd v. New York City Trial Updates: http://ccrjustice.org/floyd-trial-updates
