photo by: getty images
Monday afternoon U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that New York’s Stop & Frisk crime fighting tactics to unconstitutional. She called it “indirect racial profiling” because it targeted certain ethnic groups, resulting in the discriminatory stopping of thousands of innocent black and Hispanic men.
“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” Scheindlin wrote in her opinion.
The judge ordered that independent monitor be appointed to monitor the tactics as well as other changes to the policy.
Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002. The number of stops rose to 685,724 in 2011 from 160,851 in 2003, and only 1.8 percent of blacks and Latinos stopped had weapons on them.
