Wow. Mayor Bloomberg had his head handed to him by Judge Scheindlin. Not only did he lose, but he lost control of his own police department.
The judge designated an outside lawyer, Peter L. Zimroth, to monitor the Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution.
Judge Scheindlin also ordered a number of other remedies, including a pilot program in which officers in at least five precincts across the city will wear body-worn cameras in an effort to record street encounters. She also ordered a “joint remedial process” — in essence, a series of community meetings — to solicit public input on how to reform stop-and-frisk.
The decision to install Mr. Zimroth, a partner in the New York office of Arnold & Porter LLP, and a former corporation counsel and prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, will leave the department under a degree of judicial control that is certain to shape the policing strategies under the next mayor.
Mayor Bloomberg now goes down in history with other notorious bigots like George Wallace and Orval Faubus.
Great news and a kick in the balls to Bloomberg and his head of the praetorian guard Kelly.
Yet, the oversight is given to a former corporation counsel and prosecutor. He could be biased.
Also, can’t we expect an appeal, or was this the end of it?
Yeah, Bloomberg promised to appeal. Said he didn’t get a “fair trial.”
Asshole.
So stop-and-frisk will continue for years.
Something called “stop and frisk” might continue for years.
Business as usual in NYC – the actual practices we’ve come to know as “stop and frisk” – most certainly will not.
Possibly. Christine Quinn may go for a “light” version (if elected).
The judge sounds pretty pissed, and the oversight and imposition of remedies remain in her hands. Particularly pissed about the racial disparity.
Let’s say that “light” version includes continuing court oversight to ensure that there is no racial disparity in the stops. Any “light” version that meets that standard would be completely unrecognizable as what we have today. There aren’t enough cops and old white ladies in the entire city to allow the police to continue the policy of keeping young minority males constantly afraid of being searched.
I hope you are right. She stated this a month ago:
Link
Both Bloomberg and Kelly are racist assholes.
It’s weird, BooMan. There’s this small group of people who’s response to this decision is to run around insisting that it’s completely meaningless. Same thing at the GOS.
A judge just declared that NYC has been violating the Constitution, put the police department under court supervision, and began the process of figuring out what court-ordered remedies to put in place.
On what planet is that not a BFD?
it’s a very BFD – makes me feel like I should finally see NYC next year, if things progress well.
all the Black Blogs I frequent believe this is a BFD.
maybe there’s the answer to your quandry.
My theory: everyone knows this is a BFD, but there are some people who think that acknowledging success in any way will lead to complacency, so they feel like they need to tamp down any celebration.
Which is completely misguided. And dishonest.
At this point, on a planet where the appeal can strike it down. We will see.
bmaz at Emptywheel argues that the judge’s opinion is pretty solid.
You are probably calling this one correctly.
Between this and Holder’s decision, hopefully a lot fewer kids will be being knocked about gratuitously.
Cynicism and pessimism.
Fewer kids getting arrested, more people out of work. See, you can do it with anything. Personally, since I don’t think it has much impact on crime once it’s gone most people won’t care enough to bring it back.
A Lawyer from the NAACP legal fund on Hardball this afternoon said something that makes a lot of sense. And this headline fits what she said. What these Stop and Frisk laws are doing is cultivating a distrust of the police force and thereby making law enforcement harder. These same people who they are “stopping and frisking” are the same people law enforcement need to serve on juries and to help solve crimes by reporting and also being called as witnesses. The stop and frisk policy just make it so that these same people will not have any trust in law enforcement to be fair.
About 90 Percent of New Yorkers Stopped and Frisked Were `Innocent,’ Says NYCLU
Also too: Wingnut heads gonna explode in 5, 4, 3, 2,….
Judge in `stop-and-frisk’ case cites Trayvon Martin’s death
This is part of a process. Seattle got hit with exact the same federal/court oversight of SPD last year, and for much the same reasons. And the mayor (now up for reelection) and almost all of the city and SPD hierarchy has been resisting meaningful reform tooth and nail.
NYPD’s problems strike me as very similar (albeit in a city of eight million, not 650,000). It’s not on Bloomberg, or Kelly, or any other one person. It’s on all of them. It’s an institutional rot, a culture of bigotry and abuse that infests the department from top to bottom and that long predated either Bloomburg or Kelly (though they’ve enabled it and allowed it full reign, for sure). In a department of, what, 40,000 cops?, it’ll take years, maybe decades, to undo the kind of attitudes that both make the abuses possible and close ranks around those accused of the worst excesses.
There’s the “soft on crime” blackmail that the folks sympathetic to police “toughness” can depend on to intimidate elected officials.
Yeah, but that’s a loser argument in 2013.
Twenty years ago, crime was the most important issue in issues polling.
Check out the opening paragraph of this article: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-02-06/news/1994037076_1_arrests-vehicle-thefts-police-chief
February 06, 1994|By Ed Heard | Ed Heard,Sun Staff Writer
Crime may be the most important issue cited in recent national opinion polls, but Howard police say year-end county crime statistics released last week are encouraging.
(Sorry, I couldn’t google up the actual polling results.)
Now, crime gets one or four percent in polling about most important issues: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx
“Drugs” get zero percent.
There is absolutely no reason to duck and cover over “soft on crime” charges anymore. Eric Holder is grabbing the football and running through a hole big enough to drive a truck through. The bad guys are on the run.
Now, crime gets one or four percent in polling about most important issues: …
And even that is too high because it’s driven by the local news in most places. The old “If it bleeds, it leads” bullshit. That attitude still runs the local TV news in a lot of places, especially in the big cities.
It’s funny, Calvin, because polling also shows that people think crime has gotten worse than it was 20 years ago, when it has actually plummeted.
So people think that crime is worse, but they care about it much less?
Two conclusions: 1) people are stupid, and 2) issues priority polls are a better measure of public opinion.
Also, the “crime is worse” meme is a media problem – particularly local TV news, still where most Americans get their primary “news.” In pretty much every market the formula is violent crime, fires, sports, and weather. People think crime is getting worse because it’s all they ever hear about. Reporters don’t do remote standups (in front of a building where nothing’s happened for hours) when a report showing lower crime rates gets released. It’s not emotionally engaging to talk about all those crimes that didn’t happen. So, in many people’s eyes, it’s the reports that never happened.
I read GunCrisis.Org several times a week, which focuses on gun crimes nationally, but particularly in Philadelphia.
I spend a lot of time trying to come up with ideas to stop this Holocaust that is going on with young black kids in our cities. And I can understand the idea behind the Stop and Frisk policy, which is to convince blacks and Latinos that they can’t carry a gun in the city because they are going to get stopped and searched and arrested.
It may or may not work in terms of lowering the incidence of shootings, but it’s unconstitutional and other means must be developed. What really bothers me, though, is the argument that violent crime is going down on its own so we don’t need to be making all this extra effort. I don’t care how low people think the crime rate is, because every damn day a couple of young adults and teenagers are getting killed in Philadelphia, and we need to work hard to save these kids. Since we can’t keep the guns out of these neighborhoods, I can understand why the temptation is to make people believe that they can’t walk around with them. It’s interesting, though, that the 2nd Amendment absolutists don’t complain about this race-based policy.
Anyway, so far the solution in Philly seems to revolve around completely gutting the schools.
How is gutting the schools sold by City leaders as an anti-crime measure? Or were you being bitterly sarcastic?
The latter.
Uh, crime is going down because of less lead. We very much need to be focusing on getting rid of what’s left because it’s still significant. More than anything, that’s the long term solution.
That’s only part of it. In any public bureaucracy elected officials often fall prey to groupthink – they interact with people who work in the same institution (in this case, city government) a lot more often than they interact with their critics, and the electeds often – almost always, actually – come to identify and sympathize with them. Plus, in any bureaucracy like a city government, the electeds come and go. The senior staff and department heads who’ve been around years are the ones with real institutional knowledge. The electeds rely on them for their knowledge of “how things work,” and even well-intentioned electeds often get led around by the nose.
And that happens in almost every larger city – with or without the element of pandering to the “tough on crime” segment of the public, and with constituents like big downtown businesses and employers that have a lot of financial clout and that frequently also complain about street crime (“It scares away shoppers and tourists!”). People who live in fear of their local police may be a majority of the city, but they’re usually only one constituency, and except at election time not a very important one, at City Hall.
Needless to say, people from that very large class of police victims are almost never the people elected to public office. And even when they are, they usually keep their head down – one African-American city council member here years ago was livid when he was pulled over, arrested, and briefly jailed for no other reason than he was a black guy driving a Mercedes (ergo, he must have jacked it, right?). He was livid, but his anger never extended to giving the time of day to anyone who, unlike him, didn’t have the resources to fight back.
See comment to This is Progress.
I think it is a huge stretch to call Bloomberg a bigot or compare him to Wallace or Faubus, but he is incredibly insensitive and tone deaf on this vital civil liberties question. He refuses to see reason or walk in the shoes of Black and Hispanic men. Brothers are sick and tired of of bearing the burden of whitefolks criminal suspicions. God Bless Judge Scheindlin.
Okay, so it’s hyperbole.
But when he stands up there and argues that he’s frisking people of color because other people of color commit all the crimes, he’s so indifferent to what’s he doing that I can’t distinguish him from a bigot.
I realize that Bloomberg is walking a fine line between willful ignorance and racial animus, but I lean heavily toward giving him the benefit of the doubt. I probably should be less forgiving.