Newly Released Data Shows 1 Out Of Every 9 NYPD Officers Has A Confirmed Record Of Misconduct

NYPD recruits listen during their graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden in 2015 PETER FOLEY/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

GOTHAMIST

One cop called a Black barbershop owner the n-word as he dragged the man out of his vehicle. Another explicitly told his subordinate in a meeting to target “Black males” for police stops. Another racked up a slew of abuse complaints while he rose to become one of the NYPD’s top overtime earners.

These are just a handful of the hundreds of NYPD officers who have received multiple misconduct complaints from civilians—complaints that have been vetted and confirmed by investigations. Nearly all of these cops are still on the job, and most received minor discipline, if any at all.

Misbehavior is not uncommon in the department: roughly one out of every nine uniformed officers has a confirmed record of misconduct.

This information is coming to light thanks to last month’s repeal of Section 50-A of New York’s Civil Rights Law, a state provision that shielded police misconduct records for decades.

On Sunday, ProPublica released a database of records from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which oversees complaints from the public about the NYPD that involve abuse of authority, discourtesy, excessive force or offensive language and police lying. The database contains the CCRB records of all active-duty NYPD officers who have had at least one substantiated complaint from September 1985 to January 2020—meaning that civilian investigations confirmed one or more allegations of misconduct in that instance.

Those records show that 3,996 of the NYPD’s 36,000 uniformed officers have at least one substantiated complaint.

The most common known outcome for officers found to have been engaged in misconduct is “instruction,” the least severe form of discipline, intended for those who “misunderstand a policy,” according to the database. Many officers with substantiated complaints receive no penalty at all.

“The NYPD has for many years worked to increase transparency to gain the trust of the communities we serve,” the department said in a statement. “While we remain committed to increased transparency, we are equally committed to due process. While recent legislation repealed NYS Civil Rights Law Section 50-A, a federal judge issued a restraining order prohibiting the release of records of which allegations against our officers were found to be false, unfounded or unsubstantiated. We await the results of pending litigation.”

For years, police officers, especially union leaders, have accused the civilian agency of anti-police bias.

In a court filing on Sunday, the unions criticized the publishing of the data. “The vast majority of the allegations are admittedly unsubstantiated, and none of them have been finally adjudicated by the NYPD,” the filing said. “It is simply outrageous that this information has not been provided to plaintiffs but is now surfacing on internet databases.”

Of the 36,892 allegations in the database, 3,796 were substantiated and recommended for charges, the CCRB’s most serious disciplinary determination. Of these, only 2 resulted in officers being dismissed from the force. Most resulted in instruction, loss of vacation days, command discipline, or no penalty at all. 881 of these complaints have no penalty of any kind recorded (“N/A”), mostly due to incomplete data on NYPD outcomes from the CCRB. 

Pedro Serrano, a housing cop in Manhattan and an NYPD whistleblower, says department leaders have fostered a culture of impunity.

“They don’t care about CCRBs. They don’t care about how many times you got sued. They don’t care how many times you violate people’s rights. They just want your production numbers,” he said, referring to arrests, summonses and other enforcement activity. “If you’re a good producer and you do what you’re told, you’ll get promoted, you'll get to these specialized units, and you’ll be forgiven for all your past sins.”

A spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio did not respond to a request for comment.

In the last several weeks following the repeal of 50-A, a coalition of police, fire and corrections unions have fought to stop city agencies from releasing misconduct records to the public, arguing that “unsubstantiated” complaints violate members’ due process and employment rights.

Last week, a federal judge sided with the unions and blocked the release of records that contain “complaints that are unsubstantiated or unfounded, those in which the officer has been exonerated, those that are pending, non-final.”

But in the CCRB’s complex jargon, the term “unsubstantiated” does not mean innocence, merely the inability to prove guilt. The term “exonerated” means that the officer was found to have committed the alleged acts, but those acts were determined to be lawful, while “unfounded” complaints are determined to have no merit based on the evidence.

Transparency advocates argue that because the vast majority of complaints against the police go unadjudicated and unsubstantiated, the ability to see these records is crucial for police accountability, which is why the state law repealing 50-A was written to permit their release.

The New York Civil Liberties Union had intended to publish the entire CCRB database, containing some 81,000 records that includes all the unsubstantiated and substantiated complaints of current and former officers, but the federal judge’s order has temporarily blocked the release of the database because it contains “unsubstantiated” complaints. (ProPublica’s more limited dataset was obtained independently through a Freedom of Information law request.) A hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s enormously valuable information in looking at complaints that have not been substantiated,” said Christopher Dunn, the NYCLU’s legal director.

“First, the CCRB doesn’t even complete investigations in about half the complaints it gets. That reflects some fundamental shortcomings in the investigation process,” Dunn explained.

“Secondly, the fact they don’t substantiate a complaint does not mean misconduct did not take place. It just means they couldn’t come to a conclusion. That could be because of problems in the investigation, it could be because the police officer did not tell the truth during the interview, it could be because the police 

department didn’t cooperate and provide necessary information,” Dunn said.

The judge’s order has also blocked the release of the NYPD’s own disciplinary records, which Mayor Bill de Blasio had promised would be put into a public database this month.

“The rubber really meets the road once a case gets to the police department, and it’s essential for the public to know what the police department actually does with these cases, because only the police department can impose discipline on the officer,” Dunn said.

“This is the first water over the dam. The dam is going to break, and I think it’ll break soon.”

Investigating the Data

The 36,892 allegations contained in the database can be broken down into four different types—abuse of authority is the most common. The vast majority of complaints are not substantiated: Only 28.5% of the abuse of authority, for instance, to less than 13% of the offensive language complaints. JAKE DOBKIN / GOTHAMIST, CCRB DATA

Only 7 officers out of the approximately 4,000 in the database have 6 or more substantiated complaints. It is important to note that within a complaint, there may be multiple allegations (abuse of authority, excessive force, and offensive language, etc.). To avoid confusion about how many incidents resulted in complaints, we counted a complaint as substantiated if at least one allegation within it was proven by the CCRB’s investigation. ZACH GOTTEHRER-COHEN / GOTHAMIST, CCRB DATA

Most of the approximately 4,000 officers in the database have only one substantiated complaint, with only 7 having 6 or more substantiated complaints. However, many officers have larger numbers of unsubstantiated complaints. ZACH GOTTEHRER-COHEN / GOTHAMIST, CCRB DATA

Click here for interactive version of the Distribution of Complaints chart.

Most complaints are made against lower ranking members of the force, because there are far more low ranking officers than high-ranking ones, and low ranking officers interact more with members of the public. Most complaints against all ranks are unsubstantiated. ZACH GOTTEHRER-COHEN / GOTHAMIST, CCRB DATA

Click here for interactive version of the Complaint by Rank at Time of Incident chart.

There are far more complaints in The Bronx and Eastern Brooklyn than in other boroughs. The three precincts where officers receive the most complaints are Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, and the 46th and 44th Precincts in the Bronx.

Click here for a larger version of the Misconduct Complaints by Precinct map.

The highest number of substantiated complaints involved white police officers and Black complainants. ZACH GOTTEHRER-COHEN / GOTHAMIST, CCRB DATA

Click here for an interactive version of the Substantiated Complaints by Race graphic.

N.Y.P.D. Says It Used Restraint During Protests. Here’s What the Videos Show.

NY TIMES

At the height of the recent Black Lives Matter marches in New York City, the police were repeatedly recorded using force against protesters. The department said it exercised restraint. This is what the videos show.

It was two hours after curfew on the sixth night of protests against police brutality in New York City.

An officer in Brooklyn pushed a protester so hard that she fell backward on the pavement. Then he shoved someone on a bicycle and picked up and body-slammed a third person into the street.

Nearby, a man fell running from the police. Officers swarmed him and beat him with batons. A commanding officer, in his white-shirted uniform, joined the fray and stepped on the man’s neck.

All of it was caught on video. In fact, the New York Times found more than 60 videos that show the police using force on protesters during the first 10 days of demonstrations in the city after the death of George Floyd.

A review of the videos, shot by protesters and journalists, suggests that many of the police attacks, often led by high-ranking officers, were not warranted.

A video of five or 10 or 30 seconds does not tell the whole story, of course. It does not depict what happened before the camera started rolling. It is unclear from the videos, for instance, what the officers’ intentions were or why protesters were being arrested or told to move.

But the Police Department’s patrol guide says officers may use “only the reasonable force necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.” Force, policing experts say, must be proportionate to the threat or resistance at hand at the moment it is applied.

In instance after instance, the police are seen using force on people who do not appear to be resisting arrest or posing an immediate threat to anyone.

Punches, tackles, beatings and shoves.

Officers attacked people who had their hands up.

They hit people who were walking away from them.

They grabbed people from behind.

And they repeatedly pummeled people who were already on the ground.

Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea has maintained that misconduct during the protests was confined to “isolated cases” and that officers were confronted with violence by protesters.

He noted that during the first week of demonstrations, people looted businesses, burned police cars and attacked officers with bricks, bottles and in one case a fire extinguisher. The unrest prompted Mayor Bill de Blasio to impose an 8 p.m. curfew.

Yet for just about each viral moment that emerged from the protests — officers violently shoving a woman to the ground or beating a cyclist who seemed to be doing nothing more than trying to cross the street — The Times turned up multiple examples of similar behavior.

The police responded to words with punches and pepper spray.

Officers charged into peaceful crowds and pushed people to the ground.

Sometimes, they appeared to lash out at random.

Devora Kaye, the Police Department’s assistant commissioner for public information, declined repeated requests to review the full set of videos provided by The Times and to explain the use of force in them.

She reiterated that “isolated incidents” of misconduct were being addressed, noted that four officers had already been disciplined, and said that the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating 51 cases of use of force during the protests.

“The N.Y.P.D. has zero tolerance for inappropriate or excessive use of force,” she wrote, “but it is also critical to review the totality of the circumstances that lead to interactions where force is used.”

The police said that nearly 400 officers were injured during the protests, and that 132 of the more than 2,500 people arrested reported injuries, but that they did not have records of injured people who were not arrested. Protesters have described and documented at least five broken or fractured bones and four concussions.

The Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents most N.Y.P.D. officers, declined to comment on the videos.

The episodes in the videos The Times reviewed were spread across 15 neighborhoods in three boroughs. Several videos each were taken June 3 in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and on June 4 in Mott Haven in the Bronx, when officers “kettled” protesters into tight spaces and then beat them with batons.

Philip M. Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminologist and former police officer who studies the use of force by the police, offered a blunt assessment of the behavior shown in these videos. “A lot of this was ‘street justice,’” he said, “gratuitous acts of extrajudicial violence doled out by police officers on the street to teach somebody a lesson.”

Sometimes, the police went after people already in custody.

Sometimes officers went after people they did not appear interested in arresting at all.

Mr. Stinson said that in some of the videos, the police used force permissibly. He saw nothing inappropriate, for example, in this widely viewed video of officers using batons on people who appeared to be trying to evade arrest.

Scott Hechinger, a public defender for nearly a decade in Brooklyn, said he found it striking that being filmed by crowds of protesters did not seem to inhibit some officers’ conduct.

“That the police were able and willing to perform such brazen violence when surrounded by cellphone cameras and when the whole world was watching at this moment more than any other, underscores how police feel and know they will never be held to account in any meaningful way even for the most egregious acts of violence,” Mr. Hechinger said.

Many of the videos show violence led by officers in white shirts, signaling a rank of lieutenant or higher.

In Manhattan on June 2, one commander shoved a protester and another pulled her down by the hair.

A civil rights lawyer with the legal aid group the Bronx Defenders, Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, said  “The primary question is whether the force is reasonable, but you have to remember, if they’re not arresting someone, they shouldn’t be using any force,” Ms. Borchetta said.

At several protests, the police used bicycles as weapons.

Two officers lift their bicycles and push them repeatedly into a group of people, knocking one person over.

More often, they used their hands.

he protests, and the outcry over the policing of them, have already led to changes. State legislators overturned a law that kept police discipline records secret and New York City cut its police budget and broadened a ban on chokeholds. Last week, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, called for an independent commission to permanently oversee the Police Department.

But acts of force by the police are still being caught on video, more than six weeks into the protests.

Axel Hernandez, a high school teacher in New York City who on June 3 filmed an officer throwing someone down by the neck, said he felt it was important to continue to keep watch over the police.

“Part of the reason we’re out here is because they were on George Floyd’s neck,” said Mr. Hernandez, 30. “This is exactly why we are protesting in the first place.”

See the full set of videos at NY TIMES

The Times sought and verified videos of police use of force at protests in New York City from May 28 to June 6. The following videos were compiled from Times reporting and lists shared by T. Greg Doucette, Corin Faife, a crowd-sourced effort started on Reddit and public responses to requests by the New York attorney general’s office and the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. Some are being made public for the first time. These videos are not an exhaustive accounting of police behavior at the protests. They have been edited for length and in some cases slowed down or annotated for clarity but are otherwise unaltered.

Fires burn near White House as George Floyd protests rage. Curfews fail to deter a new wave of protests across US.

• • 
  • Police arrested about 4,100 people in U.S. cities over the weekend, according to the Associated Press. Nearly a week after Floyd’s death, it remains unclear whether tensions nationwide are calming or escalating. At least five people have been killed in violence that flared as demonstrations in parts of the country devolved into mayhem. Gunfire rang out from Detroit to Indianapolis, where authorities said people were slain in shootings connected to the protests. In Omaha, a 22-year old black protester was killed in a struggle with a local business owner on Saturday night. 
  •  
  • It’s the middle of the night in the US, where cities continue to reel under protest and violence and where Black Lives Matter leaders say president Donald Trump, has failed his country. This report from David Smith in Washington:
  • 
    For three years, the first president elected without political or military experience rode his luck and skirted past disaster. In the fourth year, the fates demanded payback.
    Not even Trump’s harshest critics can blame him for a virus believed to have come from a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, nor for an attendant economic collapse, nor for four centuries of slavery, segregation, police brutality and racial injustice.
    But they can, and do, point to how he made a bad situation so much worse. The story of Trump’s presidency was arguably always leading to this moment, with its toxic mix of weak moral leadership, racial divisiveness, crass and vulgar rhetoric and an erosion of norms, institutions and trust in traditional information sources. Taken together, these ingredients created a tinderbox poised to explode when crises came.

Demonstrators start a fire as they protest the death of George Floyd near the White House. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP[/caption]

• Fires burned in Washington DC, including near the White House. 

• As the 11pm curfew passed, an area of a few blocks around the White House was thick with smoke.
• Groups broke windows of Sweetgreen, Compass Coffee and SunTrust Bank, among other buildings, in downtown D.C. On F Street, looters ransacked Zara and Sephora, leaving mascara, eyeliner, peach-colored striped shirts and distressed jeans strewn in the street.
  “Somebody get me something!” yelled one of the lookouts. One man came out with striped shopping bags, while another carried out an entire display case of body products.
  

  • Throughout the country, police responded use tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and batons against demonstrators and press.

  •   Officers fired “beanbag rounds” at protestors in Austin, and in Denver police reportedly hit a Denver Post reporter with multiple nonlethal rounds despite him screaming “press”.

  • Journalists continue to be arrested, struck by police while covering protests

    Whether they were wearing press credentials around their necks
  • mattered little, as journalists around the country continued to be targeted by police with arrest, rubber bullets and tear gas while covering the protests.
    Los Angeles Times reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez showed photos of a large welt on his neck after being struck by a rubber bullet just after interviewing a man in Los Angeles. In Washington, MSNBC correspondent Garrett Haake was struck with a rubber bullet or bean bag — he said he wasn’t certain — while reporting live on the air near the White House, standing across from a line of police in riot gear. “I have some souvenir welts on my side to show for it,” he wrote later on Twitter. “And sorry for cursing on tv.
  • 
•  New York descended into chaos once again, as thousands of demonstrators spread throughout the city, and at one point briefly shut down the Manhattan bridge.
•  Protestors thew trash at the police and officers responded by beating crowds back with batons and making arrests.
•  
• The most jolting scenes of violence late Sunday appeared to take place in Manhattan, where chaos erupted in Union Square at around 10 p.m. Flames nearly two stories high leapt from trash cans and piles of street debris in the neighborhood, sending acrid smoke into the air.
  Protesters threw bottles and other objects at police officers armed with batons who pushed into crowds on Broadway and nearby side streets. As flames spread across one downtown street, officers ordered protesters to disperse. In Soho, looters smashed windows and stole merchandise from upscale stores.
• 
  
• WASHINGTON POST

The downtown area of this New York City borough looked like it was under martial law as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning.

Dozens of police vehicles screamed to a halt in front of a McDonald’s near the DeKalb subway stop, as what appeared to be at least a hundred officers with plastic shields pushed back on crowds shouting “George Floyd,” and “Eric Garner,” two African Americans killed by police. “Go home!” officers shouted back, waving batons.

A pile of trash burned on the asphalt. Cars honked their horns. Sirens blazed. Fire trucks rushed to the scene. Multiple times, police pushback caused a stampede — sometimes prompted by glass bottles thrown at officers from the crowd, sometimes seemingly prompted by nothing at all.

One woman who said she was a medic rushed forward to help a man bleeding from his forehead. Seconds later, she ran the opposite direction, clutching her eyes, saying she’d been pepper sprayed and asking for someone, anyone to grab saline solution from her bag.

“At nighttime they get real dirty. They want you to go home and they become very, very aggressive,” said protester Derek Rutledge, 53, an unemployed accountant born and raised in downtown Brooklyn. He’d arrived by bicycle for a way to escape if things got hairy and said this was his second night protesting. “There are good cops and there’s a whole bunch of dirty cops. If I was a cop and I saw somebody killing somebody for $20, I’d say, ‘Dude, get off of him!’ There’s no need.”

On Sunday morning, the police said that they’d made more than 300 arrests during the overnight protests in New York. At least 30 officers were injured and nearly 50 police vehicles were damaged or destroyed.

“I’m extremely proud of the way you’ve comported yourselves in the face of such persistent danger, disrespect, and denigration,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea wrote to the NYPD force on Twitter. Shea noted that the spams of violence in the city were driven by “a mob bent solely on taking advantage of a moment in American history, to co-opt the cause of equality that we all must uphold, to intentionally inflict chaos, mayhem, and injury just for the sake of doing so.”

All along Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue thoroughfare were shattered windows and piles of glass, at a TD bank, a Men’s Wearhouse, and the downtown Brooklyn Apple Store, where a single panel of the store’s tempered glass facade had cracked but was not broken.

Photographer Flo Ngala, 25, came from Harlem and was wearing a Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt. She carried a sign reading, “Can’t breathe with a mask on. Can’t breathe without one.” Most of the day, she said, had been inspiring, with crowds cheering protesters on from cars and balconies.
Among the bystanders caught up in the melee were a few people exiting the subway and a homeless woman pushing a shopping cart filled with her belongings. She leaned over and let out a hacking cough. A protester with his mask around his chin stood in the sidewalk, directing the traffic of fleeing protesters around her. “Yo brother, run that way,” he said. “Coronavirus is real.”

Around a corner, a 26-year-old black woman slumped on the sidewalk surrounded by five other protesters, all of them people of color who said they came from the city. They’d been strangers to her until moments earlier, when, they said, she’d gotten pepper sprayed. The woman’s face was caked with salt and milk from a solution the other protesters poured into her eyes to stop the burning.

Even when the stinging stopped, she cried. “They’re just good people who saw me in pain,” she said of her new protest friends. “I’m moved to tears by the kindness.”

A special education teacher from Brooklyn, the woman said she’d previously been arrested when an ex-boyfriend beat her and she physically defended herself. “I want to believe in them so badly. I want to believe that they’re good,” she said of police, but that was hard when she’d spent five hours in the same station as her ex-boyfriend.

She burst into tears explaining that she’d come out to protest, despite her fears of the police and the pandemic, because she felt like she’d be letting her students down if she didn’t.

The woman works in a poor school district with mostly children of color. “And they tell me, ‘I want to be an astronaut. I want to become a pilot,’” she said.

This protest was for them, she said, and getting pepper sprayed wasn’t going to stop her from staying out all night if she had to. “I want them to live long enough to achieve their dreams.”Donald Trump was taken into a special secure bunker as protests sparked by the death of George Floyd raged outside the White House on Friday night, according to reports. Despite days of peaceful protests and violent clashes with police in some of America’s major cities, Trump has not addressed the nation and has repeatedly sent inflammatory messages over Twitter.

• New York Mayor’s Bill de Blasio’s 25-year-old daughter was one of the demonstrators who was arrested this weekend. As outlets reported the news, a New York City police union tweeted personal information about Chiara de Blasio’s arrest.
  

•  New York police union 'doxes' mayor's daughter

  As news outlets reported that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s 25-year-old daughter had been arrested at a protest last night, a New York city police union tweeted personal information about Chiara de Blasio’s arrest.
  Gizmodo reporter Dell Cameron reported on the tweet from the Sergeant’s Benevolent Association, calling it a “doxing.”
  “How can the NYPD protect the city from rioting anarchist [sic] when the mayors object throwing daughter is one of them. Now we know why he is forbidding Mounted Units to be mobilized and keeping the NYPD from doing their jobs,” the tweet read.
  

  • NYPD officer appears to point gun at protesters

    A New York police officer appeared to point a gun at protesters in Lower Manhattan on Sunday evening, according to a video posted to social media.

    The scene, captured in a 12-second video posted to Twitter by Gothamist reporter Jake Offenhartz, occurred at approximately 10 p.m., just steps away from the city’s famed Strand bookstore and a few blocks south of Union Square.

    While crossing the street, the officer reaches for the weapon with his left hand and, pointing it at a small crowd as they run down the block. He does not appear to fire the weapon and is later corralled by a supervisory officer in white.

    “Point your gun at the f------ ground,” someone can be heard yelling the video.
• Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison will lead prosecutions related to Floyd’s death, Gov. Tim Walz announced Sunday. The governor, like Ellison a Democrat, acknowledged many people’s distrust that authorities would bring justice for Floyd,
•  
• Los Angeles county, the largest county in the US, has announced a regional curfew to go from 6pm to 6am, as a number of protests continue across southern California. Business owners and residents spent Sunday morning cleaning up after Saturday night’s explosive demonstration, with many merchants putting up “minority-owned” and “Black Lives Matter” signs on the boarded-up storefronts

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea Appointed New N.Y.P.D. Commissioner as O’Neill Resigns

NY TIMES

For Third Time, Mayor Passes Over a Black Chief to Run the N.Y.P.D.

Mayor Bill de Blasio defended his choice of a white police commissioner, saying the job was a “special calling.”

NY TIMES

Court Blocks Stop-and-Frisk Changes for New York Police

N.Y. TIMES

A federal appeals court on Thursday halted a sweeping set of changes to the New York Police Department’s practice of stopping and frisking people on the street, and, in strikingly personal terms, criticized the trial judge’s conduct and removed her from the case.
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, “ran afoul” of the judiciary’s code of conduct by compromising the “appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation.” The panel criticized how she had steered the lawsuit to her courtroom when it was filed nearly six years ago.

Lawyers for the city had gone to the Second Circuit to ask for a stay of Judge Scheindlin’s ruling and of the court-ordered mandates. In granting the stay, the circuit went beyond what the city had requested and unexpectedly ordered that the stop-and-frisk lawsuit, known as the Floyd case, be randomly reassigned.

The new judge, John Koeltl, was instructed to put off “all proceedings and otherwise await further action” from the panel. The appeals court has not yet taken up whether Judge Scheindlin’s decision reached the correct constitutional conclusion regarding the police tactics.

“We intimate no view on the substance or merits of the pending appeals,” the two-page order stated.

One civil rights lawyer who brought the stop-and-frisk case, Jonathan C. Moore, said the Second Circuit’s criticism was misplaced, and expressed shock that the panel would remove Judge Scheindlin.

“I think it’s a travesty of justice for this panel of the Second Circuit to take this case away from a judge who worked very hard for the last five years to resolve very important, serious issues involving the civil rights of the residents of New York,” Mr. Moore said.

 

In its ruling, the panel of three judges — John M. Walker Jr, José A. Cabranes and Barrington D. Parker — criticized Judge Scheindlin for granting media interviews and for making public statements while the case was pending before her, including articles in The New Yorker and by The Associated Press. In criticizing the judge for bringing the stop-and-frisk case under her purview, the three-judge panel also cited an article by The New York Times in a footnote.

At issue is the related-case rule, which allows lawyers to steer similar lawsuits before the same judge. But the Second Circuit said Judge Scheindlin had improperly applied that rule, citing her comments in 2007 to civil-rights lawyers who sought to reopen a long-settled stop-and-frisk lawsuit. If “you got proof of inappropriate racial profiling in a good constitutional case, why don’t you bring a lawsuit?” she said, according to a transcript quoted in the order on Thursday. “You can certainly mark it as related.”

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Here's the article that the U>S> Court of Appeals cited in their reversal of the case. JEFFREY TOOBIN THE NEW YORKER.  Outstanding in-depth coverage of the issues; The New Yorker at its best.

 

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JEFFREY TOOBIN NEW YORKER
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In a final irony, the resolution of the case may not matter much anymore. Bill de Blasio will be mayor soon, and he has vowed repeatedly to change the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk policy anyway. The appeals-court judges can take the case away from Scheindlin, but they can’t take the mayoralty from de Blasio.