Stop-and-frisk: NYC council overrides Bloomberg vetoes, curbing policy

The New York City Council passed into law two bills to stop NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk practices, defeating Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s earlier mayoral vetoes of both bills.

The racial profiling bill passed Thursday by the minimum 34 votes in the 51-member council expands the means by which New Yorkers can sue NYPD for biased policing.

The number of votes was exactly the minimum number needed to override a veto. Bloomberg did extensive lobbying to turn even one vote in his favor, but failed to change any member’s opinion on the issue.

The second bill that was overridden by the council passed 39 to 10 and approved the creation of an NYPD inspector general with subpoena power, a measure that Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had called a matter of “life and death.”

The two measures which are also called Community Safety Act, try to control an ongoing abuse of the tactic.

One of the measures is to establish a permanent watch to monitor the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk activities, conduct investigations, and recommend changes.

The other measure allows citizens to sue NYPD in state court if they think they are subjected to illegal profiling. Any individual or groups of minorities that feel violated by police profiling can take class actions against the police. Age, gender, housing status, and sexual orientation are among the added categories of the new definitions of profiling.

The votes were another indication for Bloomberg administration’s waning influence in the city’s politics.

People and lawmakers have been frustrated by police and have been trying to force change from outside.

The votes come two weeks after US District Court ruled the New York Police Department’s crime-fighting stop-and-frisk practices are in violation of New Yorkers’ constitutional rights.

The judge wrote in her 105-page decision that police personnel were under pressure to raise the number of stops by Mayor Bloomberg since he took office in 2002 and designated Raymond Kelly to be NYPD Commissioner.

As a result, officers stopped and searched young minority men without any reasons in violation of their constitutional Fourth Amendment rights that protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The New York Civil Liberties Union demonstrated in a 2012 report that there had been a sharp increase in the number of police stops over the period of Bloomberg’s three terms in office.

The number of searches rose from 160,851 stops in 2003 to 685,724 in 2011, while half of the 2011 searches included physical searches.