The legal team behind the landmark stop-and-frisk lawsuit is calling on a federal judge to remove the NYPD from all social distancing efforts, claiming that the department's racially-biased enforcement has violated the constitutional rights of New Yorkers.
In an emergency motion filed on Tuesday, attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Legal Aid Society argued the police department was not complying with a set of reforms ordered in the 2013 federal case that found the NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk unconstitutional. As part of that settlement, the NYPD agreed to overhaul its street-stop policies and develop policies that prohibited racial profiling.
"Seven years later, we have a really unfortunate and disturbing sense of déjà vu," said Darius Charney, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represented some of the plaintiffs in the Floyd vs. City of New York case.
"Over the past few months, the NYPD has engaged in a widespread practice of racially discriminatory law enforcement, analogous and in fact identical to the racially discriminatory practice of stop and frisk," he added during a virtual press conference announcing the motion.
Data released by the police department shows that, as with stop-and-frisk, more than 80 percent of summonses for social distancing were issued to black and Hispanic people in the first five weeks of the pandemic. The racial breakdown of social distancing arrests — released by some district attorneys, but not the NYPD — appears to be even more skewed.
The emergency motion calls on the court-appointed monitor to begin an investigation into the unequal stops within the next sixty days. It also urges Judge Analisa Torres, who is now presiding over the stop-and-frisk remediation process, to compel the NYPD to share relevant data and documents on social distancing enforcement.
During a City Council hearing last week, NYPD leaders resisted officials' demands to share additional metrics on stops and its internal policies on enforcement. Police Commissioner Dermot Shea previously argued that criticizing the department's role in the pandemic promoted a "dangerous" anti-cop agenda.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has also strenuously denied any comparison between policing during the COVID-19 crisis and the stop-and-frisk era. But after a video earlier this month showed NYPD officers tackling a mother who wasn't wearing a mask inside a Brooklyn subway station, he said the NYPD would reduce its role in social distancing enforcement.
Asked about the new order on Tuesday, the mayor said the city "believes in transparency" and would work to address any concerns raised by the federal monitor. He added that, except in certain circumstances, "when it comes to summonses related to face coverings and social distancing, that's just not the area the NYPD is going to focus on anymore."
Community advocates argue that de Blasio's talk of a "reset" to enforcement priorities is empty rhetoric that ignores widespread use of social distancing as a pretext for low-level stops. And they say the city obscuring the true toll of social distancing enforcement on communities of color, just as the NYPD previously sought to downplay the stark racial disparities of stop-and-frisk.
"The mayor’s word has changed daily. His messaging has been completely inconsistent," said Joo-Hyun Kang, the director of Communities United for Police Reform. "Under this administration there’s less transparency around police abuse than [under the] last two mayors because of the current mayor's very conservative interpretation of 50-a."
According to Jonathan Moore, another civil rights attorney who litigated the stop and frisk case, the city has declined three separate requests for more information about the NYPD's social distancing policing. He expects that the city will fight the requests for further disclosures, noting the Law Department has already indicated they'll oppose the motion.
Inquiries to the Law Department were directed to the NYPD, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York federal court declined to comment.
