A recent federal appeals court decision will effectively bar the New York Police Department from reviving the tactic known as “stop, question, and frisk” or “stop and frisk” until at least 2019—two years after the end of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s current term. The ruling will apply even if a new mayor supporting stop-and-frisk wins office in 2017. Under the decision of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, no one will ever have the opportunity to challenge District Judge Shira Scheindlin’s 2013 ruling that the tactic violated the Constitution, even though the appeals court removed Scheindlin from the case due to her “appearance of partiality.”
In its latest decision, the court held that city police unions lacked standing to continue the Bloomberg administration’s appeal of Scheindlin’s ruling, which de Blasio abandoned when he settled the case earlier this year. Scheindlin had held that stop-and-frisk, as implemented, violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. In an accompanying “remedial order,” while declaring that she wasn’t “ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk,” she effectively did just that, by prohibiting stops not based on “individualized . . . suspicion that the person stopped has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime” (emphasis in original). Thus, menacing-looking gang members lurking outside a bodega could no longer be questioned based on “an inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or hunch” that they were up to no good. Scheindlin also imposed detailed reporting requirements for each stop and appointed a monitor to ensure that her orders were carried out.
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