Thanks to Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Scheindlin, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers — those stopped on the street and searched, but never charged — may be in line for a big payday.
The city will be the poorer for that, should it come to pass. Whether it will be safer is another matter entirely.
Scheindlin yesterday granted class-action status to a 2008 lawsuit accusing the NYPD’s highly effective stop-and-frisk anti-crime policy of deliberate racial bias.
In so doing, she accused the NYPD of displaying “a deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”
Coming from Scheindlin, this is no surprise: This is the same judge, after all, who ordered a new trial for Brink’s bank robber-cum-terrorist Judith Clark 25 years after the heist, despite agreeing that Clark had no legal right to any such thing.
And she has a history with stop-and-frisk.
She presided over a 1999 lawsuit over the policy stemming from the shooting of Amadou Diallo that led to a dubious settlement that implicitly acknowledged that the NYPD had engaged in racial profiling.
Pillorying cops as racist is nothing new for the federal bench, either.
Scheindlin’s colleague, Harold Baer, infamously ordered a confessed drug courier released by saying NYPD officers are “corrupt, abusive and violent” and that residents of minority neighborhoods are right to fear them.
To be honest, there may be something to the argument that the department has imposed a quota system, which it calls “performance goals.”
But the plaintiffs and their allies don’t want to mend stop-and-frisk — they want to end it entirely.
And that must not be allowed to happen.
As Mayor Bloomberg pointedly said yesterday: “Nobody should ask Commissioner Ray Kelly to apologize — he’s not going to and neither am I — for saving 5,600 lives.”
Stop-and-frisk, he noted, has “taken more than 6,000 guns off the street in the last eight years” — and put the city on track to have its lowest-ever number of murders.
“We’re not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public safety,” he vowed.
Unless a federal judge decides otherwise.