An appellate court’s ruling that puts on hold a slew of controversial reforms to the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk means the city’s legal defense of the tactic has a “high probability” of success, Mayor Bloomberg said Friday.
A three-judge panel at the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that Manhattan federal judge Shira Scheindlin – who had ruled the police tactic had been unconstitutionally implemented by the NYPD – violated the Code of Conduct for United States judges.
The panel put a hold on her ruling and – in a rare move – kicked her off the case.
“Judges grant stays if they think that there’s a high probability that an appeal would be successful,” Bloomberg said on WOR Radio’s John Gambling Show.
“The decision was unanimous, it was unequivocal.”
But the mayor acknowledged the fate of the case may lie in the hands of the next mayor, who can choose to continue or drop the city’s appeal of Scheindlin’s ruling.
GOP candidate Joe Lhota has said he would pursue the appeal, but Democratic frontrunner Bill de Blasio said he would not.
“My understanding from Corporation Counsel is that the penalties that this judge Scheindlin had ordered would go into effect [if the appeal is dropped], although maybe you could argue in court something differently,” said Hizzoner.
For the time being, Bloomberg breathed a sigh of relief that some of the remedies Scheindlin had mandated – including assigning a federal monitor with oversight of the NYPD – would be delayed.
“We don’t want an outsider coming in who doesn’t know anything about crime fighting putting the lives of our police officers and the lives of the public on the line,” the Mayor said.
He added that the unusual removal of Scheindlin from the case backed up the city’s claims that it hadn’t been given a fair hearing in court.
“We said a number of times we thought the judge was not giving us the opportunity to present our case and to explain what the police department does [and] how we decided who to stop and question and sometimes frisk,” he said. “We didn’t get a chance to explain who is really saved here.”
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who joined the mayor for a portion of the radio show, said he was “heartened” by the appeal court ruling and its role in helping to fix the NYPD’s dented reputation.
“I think it was grossly unfair as far as the department was concerned,” he said of Scheindlin’s ruling. “They’ve done a terrific job and they were unfairly blemished in all of this – a lot of it just for sheer political purposes,” Kelly added. “So maybe this clears up some of that.”
At a Friday press conference at One Police Plaza, Kelly continued to defend the NYPD and blast Scheindlin.
“If you look at the quantum of evidence that was produced in this case it’s very, very small – weak,” he said. “The plantiff’s own expert [said] six percent of the stops that he looked at were apparently unjustified. There were 19 stops put before the judge [and] the judge herself found that 10 of the 19 stops met constitutional muster.”
“You may not agree with the procedures,” Kelly said. “Reasonable people can differ, but the quantum certainly is not there to make this sweeping indictment of our police department…We don’t racially profile. It’s against our regulations, it’s against the law.”
“We believe that we are doing everything we should be doing as far as stop, question and sometimes frisk,” he said. “We have a very comprehensive and well-developed training program for all our officers. I don’t think there is anything like it going on in this country.”
Additional reporting by Antonio Antenucci