Motion filed to expand community input on NYPD reform
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Lawyers, advocates and elected officials gathered outside One Police Plaza Thursday to have their voices heard. Photo via Communities United for Police Reform
By Rachel Vick
Community organizations and the plaintiffs behind a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk and trespass-enforcement practices rallied Thursday to encourage the courts to include community input in the reforms.
A motion to amend a 2013 ruling mandating a Court-supervised Joint Remedial Process to curb racist stop and frisk practices alleges that “meaningful engagement” with impacted communities ended with the JRP led by former court-appointed facilitator, Judge Ariel Belen.
Attorneys for David Floyd and Kelton Davis say that the creation of a Community Collaborative Board to advise the court and revived public input are the first step to remedying the lax efforts after 2018.
“In the last three years, this monitorship has veered far off course from what the court intended in its 2013 order and from what happens in most other police monitorships around the country,” said Darius Charney, Center for Constitutional Rights senior staff attorney and lead counsel in Floyd v. City of New York. “The court recognized eight years ago that successful police reform cannot happen behind closed doors… so we are asking the court to take steps to return to the public-facing, community-driven reform process it originally envisioned.”
The seven-member board would include representatives from Communities United for Police Reform, NYCHA housing and other organizations which have a demonstrated record of work on stop and frisk-related practices in impacted communities.
Alongside the formation of a CCB, the petitioners are requesting annual community surveys co-designed with the board to assess public perception of stops, bi-annul public court conferences on NYPD compliance and bi-annual field audits of NYPD activity.
Groups like Communities United for Police Reform, Justice Committee, Make the Road New York, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement offered their support through declarations submitted to the court. Elected officials including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Councilmember Brad Lander have also thrown their weight behind the claims.
They say that the federal monitor’s reliance on the NYPD’s incomplete stop-and-frisk data, statements of NYPD personnel and civilian complaints are not a reliable measure of whether stops are still racially motivated.
Of the 9,544 people stopped and frisked by the NYPD in 2020, 91 percent were New Yorkers of color, according to NYPD data. Though just 20 percent of Queens’ population, Black people accounted for 56 percent of NYPD’s stops in the borough.
“This has been a decades-long battle, but too little has changed,” said Monifa Bandele, spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform and member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
“It’s been eight years since the landmark Floyd ruling that found the NYPD’s program of stops to be unconstitutional, and there have been zero disciplinary reforms to date, while communities who continue to experience unlawful and abusive stops have been shut out of the process with little transparency,” she added. “We’re not interested in litigating this for another 20 years – our communities deserve an end to racial profiling and abusive stops immediately.”
