Metro

Man sues city in first stop-and-frisk challenge

A legally blind black man in his 50s has brought the first lawsuit challenging a stop-and-frisk since the landmark federal court ruling earlier this month.

Allen Moye, of Jamaica, Queens, sued the city in Manhattan state court yesterday, naming Detective Roger Mooyoung and five “John Doe” cops of the narcotics squad for a September 15, 2010 “unlawful search” and “false arrest” in Harlem’s 25th police precinct.

Moye, 54, claims the incident was “based on profiling.” The suit says the treatment of Moye is directly linked to Judge Shira Scheindlin’s August 12 decision finding “that the NYPD had violated the rights of thousands of citizens with respect to the application of its ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy.”

Moye talked to the Post about the arrest from his home in Queens this morning.

“They did everything wrong. They even said they don’t care about the Fourth Amendment or nothing. It don’t mean nothing to them. They do what they want to do; that’s what they said,” Moye recalled.

Moye, who’s been legally blind his entire life and is on disability, claimed the police “didn’t tell me what I did or nothing. They just went through [my clothes] like I was’t even there, and told me, ‘What are you doing here?’” To which he responded, “I thought this was a free country and you can go anywhere,” Moye said.

All the charges were dismissed against Moye on February 23, 2011, the suit says. It does not specify what Moye was charged with. A spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to comment.

Moye was waiting for a friend in his family’s neighborhood on W. 118th Street “when the police suddenly approached him….without either consent, an arrest warrant, a lawful search warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion that [he] had committed a crime,” the court documents say.

“The police asked Allen what he was doing there and snatched his identification from him, and when Allen complained the police spoke rudely to him and placed him under arrest.”

Cops hauled Moye to the 25th Police Precinct and strip searched him, then issued a desk appearance ticket.

The suit says cops had no evidence that Moye committed a crime, but police made the false allegations “to cover up their misconduct, to retaliate against [Moye], to meet productivity goals and quotas, and to justify overtime expenses.”

The suit specifically states that the police officers are “sued in their individual and official capacities.”

Martin Guggenheim, a law professor at New York University, said “this lawsuit will not be won or lost based on anything that the federal court held because the federal court case was about whether the practice or policy is constitutional,” not about individual incidents.

But Guggenheim argued, the ruling has changed the legal atmosphere.

“Judges are going to be more inclined to credit the plaintiff than the past because the police were found by Judge Scheindlin to have testified falsely in some respects and to have not candidly revealed their practices.”

Moye wants unspecified monetary damages.

The city’s Law Department is looking into the lawsuit.