Paul J. Larkin, Jr. · September 2013
82 GEO. WASH. L. REV. ARGUENDO 1 (2013)
For more than a decade, the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”) has pursued an aggressive strategy to reduce street crime. Among the steps that the NYPD has taken is to stop and frisk anyone suspected of having committed, committing, or being about to commit a crime, such as the illegal possession of a firearm. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have touted the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice as being responsible for the reduction in crime, particularly homicides, that New York City has witnessed over the past decade. The practice is controversial, however, because the vast majority of individuals stopped are African American or Hispanic. This controversy eventually made its way into court. Nineteen parties who had been stopped by the NYPD brought suit against the City in Floyd v. City of New York. After a trial, the federal district court ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice violated the Fourth Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court, however, applied the wrong legal analysis to the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment claims. The court relied on a statistical analysis of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice as a whole, but the Fourth Amendment requires each stop or frisk to be examined individually. By contrast, the district court may have been correct in its equal protection ruling. The court was troubled by evidence in the record that the NYPD cared only about the number of stops, not their legality, as well as evidence of bigotry. That evidence may be sufficient to support the court’s ruling.
