NYPD Wrongly Targeted Minorities, Judge Rules

In a repudiation of a major element in the Bloomberg administration's crime-fighting legacy, a federal judge has found that the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in New York and called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms.

 
In a blistering decision issued Monday, the judge, Shira Scheindlin, found that the Police Department had "adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling" that targeted young minority men for stops. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city would appeal the ruling, angrily accusing the judge of deliberately not giving the city "a fair trial."
 
The mayor cited the benefits of stop-and-frisk, crediting the tactic for making the city safer and for ridding the streets of thousands of illegal guns.
 
But in her ruling, Scheindlin found that in doing so, the police systematically stopped innocent people in the street without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing.