NEW YORK (AP)–Finding New York City's attitude
"deeply troubling," a judge granted class action status Wednesday to
a lawsuit that accuses police of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics
with stops and searches without cause.
U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that
there was "overwhelming evidence" that the practice has led to
thousands of illegal stops.
The lawsuit alleges that the police department
purposefully targeted black and Hispanic neighborhoods and said officers are
pressured to meet quotas as part of the program and are punished if they don't.
The Police Department has said it made 203,500
street stops during the first three months of 2012, up from 183,326 in the
first three months of 2011.
The city has responded to the lawsuit by saying
a court order to stop the practice would amount to "judicial
intrusion."
Scheindlin called that "disturbing."
"First, suspicionless stops should never
occur," Scheindlin wrote.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly declined to
comment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the program, saying it had helped the
city prevent thousands of deaths.
"It's taken more than 6,000 guns off the
streets in the last eight years, and this year we are on pace to have the
lowest number of murders in recorded history," Bloomberg said. "We're
not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public
safety."
The city law office said in a statement:
"We respectfully disagree with the decision and are reviewing our legal
options."
Darius Charney, who argued the case on behalf of
the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal organization, said the
ruling "reinforces that this is a citywide problem the NYPD needs to address."
The RAND Corp. research organization, in a study
commissioned by the NYPD and released in 2007, acknowledged that "black
pedestrians were stopped at a rate that is 50% greater than their
representation in the residential census."