Community Must Have a Say in Stop and Frisk Reform, Says Harlem’s “Cop Watcher”

A judge has ruled the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program unconstitutional, though the city is sure to appeal.

Screenshot of one of Joseph Hayden’s Copwatch videos. The officer stopped a bike messenger, then gave Hayden a ticket for being double parked while filming.

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Joseph “Jazz” Hayden said that he had seen the cops who frisked him before.

Hayden has gray hair that covers his face in a well-kept beard, wears glasses and carries a flipcam. He began filming videos of stops and frisks by police in his New York City neighborhood and posting them to his website, All Things Harlem, in 2009. Since then, videos on his “Copwatch” playlist have drawn close to 460,000 views.

According to Hayden, he filmed NYPD officers harassing two young men in October 2011, and the same officers pulled him over two months later. “They searched and found a pen knife that you can buy in any five-and-ten store in the country, and a miniature bat you can get at any baseball stadium in the country,” he said. “They charged me with a felony for weapons.”

Hayden, 72, said he’d been arrested 22 times before devoting himself to his videographic community activism. His arrest two years ago was the focus of a series of rallies and an online petition calling for the charges to be dropped. The case was dismissed last spring, Hayden said.

One of the most viewed videos in Joseph Hayden’s Copwatch series.

Yet it was Monday’s court ruling on the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk program that he was really waiting on.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, which found the program unconstitutional, does not outlaw stops completely. It does, however, mandate that future stops occur under the eye of a court-appointed independent monitor. Scheindlin also ordered a pilot program, in which patrolling officers need to wear cameras, be created in precincts registering the highest numbers of stops.

As the ruling details, more than 4.4 million stops were recorded between 2004 and 2012. The peak year was 2011, when 686,000 stops took place. Scheindlin called the program “indirect racial profiling,” with blacks and Latinos representing upward of 80 percent of stops.

“I think the conclusions were fact-based,” Hayden said. “Clearly this was racial profiling and gross abuse by the police department in New York City.”

Still, he said the pilot program should be taken a step further. “The remedy for stop-and-frisk is personal liability,” Hayden said. “Holding the officers that conduct those searches, they should be personally liable. That’s the only way.”

“I think there’s not enough community oversight in the monitoring of the police department,” he added. “The community needs to be more involved in the solution of this thing. The people in the community were impacted. To exclude them from the solution — from having a voice — is a major shortcoming.”

Hayden is not the only one who felt Monday’s ruling didn’t go far enough.

Quardean Lewis-Allen, an architectural designer, lives and works in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that recorded nearly 9,000 stops in 2010 alone. Lewis-Allen, a tall 25-year-old with dreadlocks who dresses nicely for work, was stopped on his way on his way home from the gym because, he was told, his water bottle appeared to contain liquor.

“The bogusness of a lot of the stops is the most inflammatory thing that residents face on the regular basis,” said Lewis-Allen, who founded a program that introduces underserved young people to design, and is a member of Next City’s 2013 Vanguard. “I guess the most jarring thing is it’s young men on right path. A group of men could be coming from the recreation center. [Police will] stop the whole group, as they’re holding helmets and football equipment.”

“The statistics say the number has been reduced, but I don’t know,” he continued. “You can ask any young man in Brownsville if it’s been reduced, they’ll tell you no.”

Lewis-Allen was pleased with the ruling, but saw it as more of a first step than a solution. “Acknowledging that there’s going to be a lot of hurdles in the overall struggles to change the relationship between the NYPD and the residents, maybe we have the right people on our side for moving the discussion about the policy forward,” he said. “But I think we have a lot of work to do. At this point, it’s a dialogue.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirmed plans to appeal Scheindlin’s ruling in a press conference Monday afternoon, claiming that stop-and-frisk is a critical deterrent against homicide and citing the drop in shootings over the course of his administration.

“Think about what that change really means: If murder rates over the last 11 years had been the same as the previous 11 years, more than 7,300 people who today are alive would be dead,” Bloomberg said, taking issue with the absence of the “historical cuts in crime” in Scheindlin’s decision. Bloomberg also questioned the fairness of the trial.

Scheindlin was careful to note that her decision does not strike down the stops themselves, but rather the means by which they’re carried out.

“I emphasize at the outset as I have throughout the litigation that this case is not about the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk in deterring or combating crime,” Scheindlin wrote. “This court’s mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool.’”

Bloomberg has long been a staunch defender of stop-and-frisk and hasn’t ignored critics of its alleged racial bias. In fact, he has often fired back at them — for instance, commenting on his weekly radio show in June that he believes whites are being stopped too much, and blacks too little. In April, after the death of a black teenager in the Bronx, he argued that it’s the lives of blacks and Latinos stop-and-frisk tactics protect.

Not that the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk hasn’t generated its own debate. Some researchers note that the crime drop began before Bloomberg took office. Radio station WNYC published a map showing how many weapons were seized outside of stop-and-frisk hotspots. There’s also the high numbers of innocent people who get stopped: In 88 percent of stops, people were found without weapons or contraband. Out of the 4.4 million stops, 2.3 million lead to frisks, and only in 1.5 percent of frisks was a weapon discovered.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, men who have been stopped multiple times, argued the program was unconstitutional on two counts: First, that the stops lack reasonable suspicion, and two, that stops are conducted in a manner that is not race neutral. Scheindlin agreed and asked for stop-and-frisk’s “human toll” to be taken into consideration.

“While it is true that any one stop is a limited intrusion in duration and deprivation of liberty, each stop is also a demeaning and humiliating experience,” she wrote. “No one should live in fear whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life.”

Democratic mayoral candidates Anthony Weiner, Bill Thompson and Bill de Blasio all supported the ruling. Stop-and-frisk has become a major issue of the campaign: De Blasio, who now leads in the polls after lagging in fourth place only a month ago, released his first television ad last week. It stars his son Dante, a mixed-race 15-year-old, who calls his father “the only [candidate] who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color.”

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Cassie Owens is a regular contributor to Next City. Her writing has also appeared at CNN.com, Philadelphia City Paper and other publications.

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Tags: new york citypolicecrimepublic safetymichael bloomberg

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