Federal Court Monitor’s Latest Report Shows Ongoing Constitutional Violations, Center for Constitutional Rights Responds

December 16, 2019, New York – In response to the release, today, of the latest status report by the court-appointed monitor in the landmark stop-and-frisk case Floyd v. City of New York, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement from Senior Attorney Darius Charney:

Six years after a federal court found the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices racially discriminatory, it is clear the NYPD has failed to meaningfully address this ruling . The court-appointed monitor’s 10th report shows that significant racial disparities persist, with Black and Latinx New Yorkers much more likely than whites to be subjected to illegal stops.

The monitor further found serious flaws in the NYPD’s process for investigating racial profiling complaints against its officers, to the extent that complainants, witnesses and officers are often not even interviewed, leads are not followed up on, and investigators often fail to take note of prior profiling complaints against particular officers. This is unsurprising given the report by the NYPD Inspector General last summer, which found that of the more than 2,600 racial profiling complaints members of the public made against NYPD officers in the past four years, NYPD internal investigators found every single one to be “unsubstantiated.” These and other shortcomings identified in the report point to serious, systemic, ongoing problems that go to the heart of the unconstitutional racial bias found in our lawsuit and which cannot be fixed by implicit bias training or changes to the Patrol Guide.

At the same time, absent from the monitor’s report is any data or input from the people who are being policed. As the Floyd court recognized in ordering a Joint Remedial Process that included extensive community input, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk problems cannot be remedied without the expertise of affected communities.