Bed-Stuy Stop-And-Frisk Case: Judge Rules Not To Dismiss

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — A Brooklyn federal judge rejected the city's proposal to dismiss a stop-and-frisk lawsuit filed against the NYPD in 2012, the New York Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday. In Wednesday's ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Sandra Townes declared that the public had a right to record police, and she rejected the city's claim that NYPD officers were immune from being sued.

The NYCLU filed the suit in 2012 on behalf of Hadiyah Charles, a community activist from Bed-Stuy who recorded video on her phone of police stopping and frisking three black teenagers in her neighborhood in 2012. They were fixing a bike down the street from her home, and she believed the stop-and-frisk might have been unjust, according to court documents. As soon as the officers saw her filming, they promptly shoved Charles, handcuffed her, arrested her and held her in jail for an hour and a half, the complaint said. They issued her a summons on what the NYCLU declared "spurious charges," according to court documents.

The NYCLU argued in the case that the officers violated Charles' First and Fourth Amendment rights under the constitution.

"New Yorkers have a constitutional right to film police activity in public," said NYCLU Senior Staff Attorney Molly Kovel, who is lead counsel on the case. "The right to film is especially important in neighborhoods of color, like Bedford-Stuyvesant, which have had high rates of problematic police activity. With a camera on most cell phones, bystanders have an important role to play in exposing police abuse and holding the NYPD accountable."

Requests for comment to Charles and the city law department were not immediately returned.

Stop-and-Frisk incidents have sharply declined in New York since 2012 partially due to former mayor Michael Bloomberg's and current mayor Bill de Blasio's efforts to curtail it. However the percent of stop-and-frisk incidents that involve a black citizen has not changed. In 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by police officers 532,911 times, 55 percent of which were incidents involving black citizens, according to numbers compiled by the NYCLU. In 2015, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 22,939 times, 54 percent of which were incidents involving black citizens, the NYCLU recorded.

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