Suit challenges increased racial profiling

Civil rights attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 4 charging that police in Philadelphia are illegally stopping pedestrians based on race with little or no justification. This comes amid a rising tide of police brutality and the arrest on criminal charges of 15 members of the Philadelphia Police Department since March 2009.

Attorney David Rudovsky and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed the lawsuit, accusing police of going overboard with their aggressive stop-and-frisk policy. They noted that in 2009 police stopped 253,333 pedestrians, compared with 102,319 in 2005. More than 70 percent of those stopped were Black.

According to the suit, only 8 percent of the stops resulted in an arrest, usually for “criminal conduct that was entirely independent from the supposed reason for the stop.”

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter instituted the stop-and-frisk policy in 2008 after making it a key platform of his election campaign. He claimed the practice would cut down on the number of illegal guns carried on the street.

In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio ruled that police may legally stop and frisk a pedestrian if there is “reasonable suspicion” of illegal activity. Mark McDonald, a spokesperson for Nutter, claimed the city was “following the Supreme Court requirements.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 5)

In 2008 more than 600 police supervisors were given a two-hour training course on how to carry out the policy. They were supposed to instruct district officers that the policy did not allow police to stop people for no reason, throw them up against a wall, pat them down and frisk them. But the lawsuit contends this is exactly what is happening and that the training was ignored.

“Implicitly, the message is, make as many stops as possible and hopefully you’ll find something,” said Rudovsky. Filed on behalf of eight individual Black and Latino plaintiffs, the suit asks “for remedies to prevent race-based pedestrian stops and other constitutional violations.”

Plaintiffs to the suit include Fernando Montero, a University of Pennsylvania ethnographer, stopped four times in 2010; State Rep. Jewell Williams (D), arrested in 2009 when he overtly questioned aggressive police tactics; and Mahari Bailey, a Georgetown Law School graduate and attorney in Philadelphia, stopped four times over the last 18 months.

The plaintiffs want the court to prevent police from conducting stops based on race or national origin, and are seeking class-action status. Their suit raises the “history of racially biased policing in Philadelphia” and asks the court to order more training, supervision and monitoring of police.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York has also filed a lawsuit challenging the use of stop and frisk by the New York Police Department. CCR staff attorney Darius Charney noted that 85 percent of the 575,000 pedestrians stopped over the past six years have been Black or Latino/a. Officers “target communities of color. They really behave as if they are occupying forces in a community,” Charney said. (Washington Post, Nov. 4)