Back in September, the New York City Police Department officially started giving people receipts when they stopped and frisked them. The procedure was designed to prevent dubious searches, increase officer accountability, and help repair the relationship between cops and minority communities.
Of 600 street stops documented over the course of three months in 2015, nearly a third were unconstitutional, as their report forms did not articulate reasonable suspicion for the stop or frisk.
On Thursday exactly a year ago, New York City was practically on fire. The startling decision last December 3 by a grand jury to not indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer behind the videotaped death of Eric Garner, blew the lid off a razzled metropolis whose citizens were already familiar with police brutality and discrimination. By then, of course, protests had spread across the country, due to the nearly concurrent decision with Michael Brown's case in Ferguson. In New York, as in Missouri, the anger was palpable—like you could reach out and touch it. And it stayed that way, for a while.
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive change. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.
***
In 2013, Communities United For Police Reform created a video series to highlight the negative impact of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy. Produced by Firelight Films, the short documentaries tell the stories of ordinary New Yorkers – and how they and their neighborhoods have been impacted by the policy.
Communities United for Police Reform, in collaboration with the Center on Race, Crime, and Justice and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, created a website to serve as a clearinghouse of independent research on stop-and-frisk and related policing practices. The website features a library of research papers, divided into the themes of the impact of, legality of, effectiveness of, and alternatives to - stop and frisk and related policing practices.
NEW YORK - Mayor Bloomberg boasts that when New York does something, like banning super-size soft drinks, the world pays attention. Now a class action lawsuit against the New York Police Department (NYPD)'s stop-and-frisk tactics is putting him and a policy he championed in an ugly glare.