Floyd v. City of New York
| Floyd v. City of New York | |
|---|---|
| United States District Court for the Southern District of New York | |
| Full case name | David FLOYD, Lalit Clarkson, Deon Dennis, and David Ourlicht, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated, Plaintiff, v. The CITY OF NEW YORK, et al., Defendants. |
| Date decided | August 12, 2013 |
| Citations | 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 |
| Judge sitting | Shira A. Scheindlin |
| Case history | |
| Subsequent actions | The city initially appealed the ruling but after Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, the city dropped its appeal. The sides are currently in negotiations. |
| Related actions |
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| Case holding | |
| The court held that the city was liable for violating the plaintiffs' Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, due to the police department's widespread practice of suspicionless stops and frisks of African-American and Latino suspects. In a separate order issued the same day, the court ordered a series of remedies, including the appointment of a monitor, immediate reforms to the stop-and-frisk program, revisions to training programs, changes to stop-and-frisk record-keeping, changes to supervision and discipline, the institution of a pilot project providing for the use of body cameras by police officers, and a joint remedial process to ensure continued community input. | |
| Keywords | |
| Fourth Amendment, New York City stop-and-frisk program, Racial profiling, New York City Police Department | |
Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. is a set of cases addressing the class action lawsuit filed against the City of New York, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and named and unnamed New York City police officers (“Defendants”), alleging that defendants have implemented and sanctioned a policy, practice, and/or custom of unconstitutional stops and frisks by the New York Police Department (“NYPD”) on the basis of race and/or national origin, in violation of Section 1983 of title forty-two of the United States Code, the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Constitution and laws of the State of New York.
Although this case is a class action suit filed on behalf of the minority citizens of the city of New York, David Floyd and David Ourlicht specifically alleged that the NYPD had employed "stop and frisk" on them without reasonable suspicion.
Floyd, an African–American man, claimed that on February 27, 2008, he was walking on the path adjacent to his house in the Bronx, New York. He encountered the basement tenant, also an African–American man, who indicated that he was locked out of his apartment and asked for help because Floyd's godmother owned the building. Floyd then went upstairs to retrieve the key and he retrieved seven to ten keys because he was unsure of the correct key for the basement lock. Floyd and the tenant went to the basement apartment door and started trying the various keys. After trying five or six keys, they found the correct one. However, before they could open the door, three NYPD officers approached them and asked the two men what they were doing, told them to stop, and proceeded to frisk them. The officers asked the men to produce identification and interrogated the two men as to whether they lived there and what they were doing.
The officers claimed they had stopped Floyd because they believed Floyd was in the middle of committing a burglary. The officers maintained that Floyd's behavior was suspicious and there had been a burglary pattern for that time of day in the neighborhood. The officers recorded Floyd's stop and frisk on a UF250 form, indicating that the suspected crime was burglary. In response to the question “Was Person Searched?,” the officers checked “No.” The three officers also claimed that they were unaware of any quotas or expectations that they complete a certain number of stops or UF250s per tour or per month.
David Ourlicht, who is of African–American and Italian ancestry, testified that around 10 a.m. on the morning of either June 6 or June 9, 2008, he was sitting on a bench with an African–American male friend, outside the Johnson public housing complex in Harlem, New York. After sitting on the bench for about ten minutes, Ourlicht noticed two male uniformed police officers walking through the housing complex. When the two officers reached the corner, they turned, drew their weapons and screamed “ ‘Get on the floor, get on the floor!’ and ‘There's a gun around here. Everybody get on the floor!’ ” At the same time, a blue and white police van arrived and three or four officers exited the van. All of the police officers were running and had their guns out. The officers told Ourlicht that they had received reports that there was a gun in the vicinity. The officers patted Ourlicht down, lifted him by the belt, “check[ed] underneath [him], and check[ed his] pockets.” The other individuals sitting outside were also told to lie on the ground, were lifted by their belts, and were searched. After the men had been lying on the ground for about ten minutes, the officers told them they could get up. The officers then demanded that all of the men provide their names and identification. The NYPD was unable to provide any evidence to support the notion that the police received a report of a gun in Ourlicht's vicinity on June 6 or June 9, 2008, or that a gun was ever recovered from the area.
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