Police practices in New York: between racial profiling, discrimination and unconstitutionality

• Author: Luiza Maria Filimon
• Position: Ph.D. student, Doctoral School of Political Science, The National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest
• Pages: 189-200

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov

Series VII: Social Sciences • Law • Vol. 8 (57) No. 2 - 2015

POLICE PRACTICES IN NEW YORK:

BETWEEN RACIAL PROFILING,

DISCRIMINATION AND

UNCONSTITUTIONALITY

Luiza Maria FILIMON1

Abstract: In August 2013, in a historic class action lawsuit, Floyd, et al. v.

City of New York, et al., brought against City of New York, Police

Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and police

officers, Judge Shira Scheidlin ruled that Stop and Frisk was

unconstitutional, arguing that: “[i]n order for an officer to have reasonable

suspicion’ that an individual is engaged in criminal trespass, the officer must

be able to articulate facts providing a minimal level of objective justification

for making the stop’ which means something more than an inchoate and

unparticularised suspicion or hunch”. This article looks at the history,

results and consequences behind New York Police Departments’ standard

policies for combating and preventing crime: Stop-and-Frisk.

Key words: civil rights abuses, discriminatory policies, racial profiling,

New York Police Department, Stop-and-Frisk.

1 Ph.D. student, Doctoral School of Political Science, The National School of Political and Administrative

Studies, Bucharest.

1. Introduction

The problems affecting the police

departments across the United States are

systemic and they cannot be reduced just to

the “bad apples” metaphor as a stand in for

the “ABC theory on police malpractice”,

where ABC stands for: Abuse, Brutality and

Corruption. An Amnesty International

report issued in June 2015, found that:

“[t]he United States has failed to track how

many people are killed by law enforcement

officers; [while] all 50 states and

Washington, D.C. fail to comply with

international law and standards on the use

of lethal force by law enforcement

officers” [39]. In 2009, a report issued by

the American Civil Liberties Union in

partnership with The Rights Working

Group, stated that one of the dominant and

grievous forms of discrimination continues

to be ethnic and racial profiling [43].

Fifty years earlier, in 1965, the Johnson

administration passed the Law

Enforcement Assistance Act, in order to

assuage “white fears of black agitation” in

the context of the 1960s civil rights

movement [33]. The law had both a direct

and indirect effect on what Thompson

regards as the “complete overhaul of this

country’s criminal laws as well as its state

and federal polices governing policies”

[33]. The author further notes that in 1965

when the foundation for the carceral state