Judge rules that millions can sue NYPD over stop-and-frisk

A federal judge in New York has given the go ahead for a class action lawsuit to move forward against the city’s police department over allegations that its stop-and-frisk program has continuously allowed officers to discriminate against minorities. In a ruling made Wednesday by US District Judge Shira Scheindlin, the pending suit against the NYPD, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others was granted class action status. Authorities seem nonplussed. When asked for his take on Judge Scheindlin’s decision, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told the New York Times that he had no comment because the litigation was continuing, but offered one quip: “It is what it is.” Mayor Bloomberg also said he couldn’t comment specifically on the ruling, but, according to the Associated Press, had some words nonetheless. "Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize – he's not going to and neither am I – for saving 5,600 lives. And I think it's fair to say that stop, question and frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD's work; it's taken more than 6,000 guns off the streets in the last eight years, and this year we are on pace to have the lowest number of murders in recorded history. … We're not going to do anything that undermines that trend and threatens public safety,” said the mayor. For others, however, it doesn’t seem as clear cut; in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin decries, "First, suspicionless stops should never occur.” The current case began to take hold all the way back in 2008 when attorneys representing four plaintiffs first began seeking class action status. The four original named plaintiffs say that they were wrongfully stopped and frisked based on their race. In only 2011, the NYPD stopped 685,724 New Yorkers, reports the American Civil Liberties Union. In all, 89 percent of those stopped were either black or Latino. Of the nearly 700,000 cases in that year alone, 88 percent of the people stopped were found innocent. Such statistics are largely typical for previous years, although one thing that has changed as time has gone on is the number of pedestrians stopped by law enforcement. “[T]he policing policies that the city has implemented over the past decade and half have led to a dramatic increase in the number of pedestrian stops, to the point of now reaching almost 600,000 a year,” Judge Scheindlin wrote of the case earlier this year. Now anyone that feels they have been victimized similarly by the New York Police Department by means of an invasive and unwarranted search since 2005 can add their name to the case. By way of the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policies, police officers in the Big Apple are allowed to conduct searches of suspicious persons if they have reason to believe that they are committing a crime. Statistics documenting the history of the program reveal, however, that skin color seems to play a pivotal role when the police are left to decide who is frisked and who isn’t. Judge Scheindlin says it is unlikely that many people will sign on to the case, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many who would be excluded from doing so. The NYPD has already stopped and frisked more than 200,000 people on the streets of New York in the first three months of 2012 alone; between 2004 and 2009, around 2.8 million similar stops were carried out. “This case presents an issue of great public concern: the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos, as compared to Whites, who become entangled in the criminal justice system,” the judge writes in her ruling. “The specific claims raised in this case are narrower but they are raised in the context of the extensively documented racial disparities in the rates of stops, arrests, convictions, and sentences that continue through the present day.” Elsewhere in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin says that the NYPD’s arguments in favor of the program appear “cavalier” and display “a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” In a statement offered to the AP, the law office for the city of New York says, "We respectfully disagree with the decision and are reviewing our legal options."

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Late last night officials in Islamabad announced that they had approved the reopening of roads leading into landlocked Afghanistan to the NATO supply convoys that need them. The new accord’s final details have yet to be worked out. That decision cleared the way for an official invitation to be extended to Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, just in time for him to attend a NATO summit on the future of Afghanistan, to be held in Chicago May 20th-21st. The roads were shut in a rage after American aircraft bombarded a Pakistani post near the Afghan border in November, killing 24 soldiers and injuring over a dozen others. The incident appears to have been a ghastly accident, though some in Pakistani officialdom suspect that it was deliberate.

What Pakistan is getting from the new agreement is revenue from a transit tax to be slapped on NATO’s supplies, with the actual tolls yet to be finalised. It is thought that the fee will come to $1,500-$1,800 per truck. With the NATO traffic expected to bring 600 trucks per day barrelling in and out of Afghanistan on Pakistani roads, that should earn a cool $1m a day. Not a fortune perhaps, but better than compensation for a trade that tends to mash up poorly made country roads. Aside from the apology and the transit tax, Pakistan had wanted America to clear its dues under the Coalition Support Funds (CSF) programme, a scheme that is supposed to reimburse Pakistan for money spent guarding its western frontier with Afghanistan. That money should flow at some point, though presumably it will be much less than the $2 billion that Pakistan reckons it is owed.

The fourth major issue was drone attacks—the missile strikes on suspected militants that unmanned aircraft carry out in Pakistan’s tribal region. While Pakistan’s government says that it wants the drones to cease fire, it realises this isn’t going to happen. What it is in effect asking is for some control over whom the strikes kill.

Jewish groups criticized a Rome judge for fining an Italian journalist who satirized a newspaper caricature of an Italian Jewish politician that many deemed anti-Semitic. In a ruling last week, Judge Emanuela Attura indicated that she would compel journalist Peppino Caldarola to pay the court-ordered fine of more than $32,000 stemming from the case, in which Caldarola was charged with slandering extreme-leftist writer Vauro Senesi. Senesi’s caricature of politician Fiamma Nirenstein was published in 2008 in the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto. Calling her “Fiamma Frankenstein,” it showed Nirenstein as a monster with wild hair and hooked nose, wearing a Star of David and a fascist symbol. Nirenstein is a member of the right-wing Freedom Party.

An Italian court has ruled that a controversial illustrator could not be publicly accused of anti-Semitism because of his actions on behalf of causes related to third world countries.

My reaction to this, like that of the Jewish community in Italy, is anger, shock and disbelief," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "We are completely bewildered at this hypocritical judgment which turns the world upside down and punishes free speech while protecting anti-Semitic and bigoted speech. Peppino Caldarola had the courage to stand up and say 'no' to anti-Semitism and bigotry. And for this he gets fined?" Mr. Foxman, who is currently in Rome for a series of meetings with Italian government officials, said he was pleased that a fund has been established to help Mr. Caldarola pay the fine. "We encourage Italians to make even a small donation to protest this ruling and support Mr. Caldarola for having the courage to speak out against anti-Semitism," he said

Just to recap, on February 23, Nechemya Weberman was arrested, arraigned in Kings County Criminal Court, and released on $15,000 cash bail. The arraignment specified multiple charges of sexually abusing a Hasidic girl in Williamsburg, starting when she was twelve years old and continuing until she was 15. The next day I was the first to note his active role in the vaad hatznius (modesty committee) which is how he first got involved in the life of this girl. Three days after his arrest, Pablo Guzmán reported that other victims of Weberman were expected to come forward. I followed up with a post urging potential witnesses to call the NYPD Sex Crimes Unit.

In Who Will Watch the Watchers? I reported on a regular extortion racket of the vaad hatznius in Williamsburg and other hasidic communities. A member of the vaad would tell an individual or family that they faced embarrassment and serious loss of social status because of some infraction of the modesty code. The Vaad would then ask for payments of anywhere between $5,000 and $30,000 for “therapy” and other expenses. The vaad would select the “therapist” who might be a member of the vaad himself, like Weberman. Sometimes it was Yaakov Yagen, a “torah therapist,” who worked out of Weberman’s Classon Avenue office. I urge those who have not yet read Who Will Watch the Watchers? to check it out. I also urge everyone to steer clear of unlicensed “therapists.”

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