Bill de Blasio hasn’t even won the mayor’s race yet and already he’s suffered his first rebuke.
The Democratic hopeful has spent this campaign smearing the police for stopping, questioning and frisking New Yorkers based on racial profiling. To back up his claims, he’s repeatedly cited a ruling by federal Judge Shira Scheindlin that found the cops’ behavior unconstitutional.
Now a three-judge panel of the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has put Scheindlin’s entire ruling under a cloud — by suggesting she’s the one who’s biased. In a stinging mandate issued Thursday, the judges accused her of running “afoul of the Code of Conduct” for judges, removed her from the case and kept the mandate in their court, a signal they will not tolerate any lower court messing with it.
Given the import of the case, the rarity of this kind of judicial slapdown, and the fact that it’s not her first, the most honorable course would be for Judge Scheindlin to resign. In the meantime, all her overreaching remedies — from imposing a court-appointed monitor to requiring body cameras for cops — are on hold until an appeals court can hear the city’s case against them.
We’ve been arguing as much from the day Scheindlin handed down her diktat. No paper has devoted more of its editorials, opeds and news stories to press the issues of Scheindlin’s bias and the urgency of this appeal than The Post.
Thursday’s ruling doesn’t resolve the substantive issue — whether the cops are guilty of racial profiling, which is unconstitutional. But it does render unsustainable de Blasio’s promise to drop the appeal as mayor, given the strong grounds for success the Second Circuit’s ruling suggests.
The larger story of this case is that our police force, arguably the world’s most professional, has been treated shabbily by a politicized faction that resents its successful service to New York. How terrible for this city that the only thing the leading candidate for mayor can say is that he is “disappointed” by judges who are insisting only that our cops get their day in (an honest) court.