UPDATE #2: Daily News front page at the end
UPDATE: Ed Koch must be rolling around in his grave
The Wall Street Journal and Daily News both demolish the ruling; the Post ditto. Only the dilettantes on the NY Times editorial board agree with the dilettante judge (who lives in a very safe NY neighborhood). To read all four editorials takes less than ten minutes, so hit the links.
Here's the WSJ, in a 13 paragraph editorial (I excerpted four) systematically destroying the opinion:
A judge claims systemic bias based on a handful of questionable cases.
So we're down to 14 or fewer out of 4.4 million, which hardly
suggests a policy or custom at all. But let's look a little closer at
those 14. They include a February 2008 stop of David Floyd, the named
plaintiff who, along with another man, was observed trying numerous keys
and jostling a door in an area where a series of burglaries had
recently been reported. Because burglary is often a violent crime, the
judge thought the cops were justified in stopping and frisking the mens'
outer garments but went too far in checking Mr. Floyd's pockets.
Therefore the judge ruled that his Fourth Amendment rights had been
violated.
Then there's Clive Lino, stopped and frisked in 2011 because he
matched the description of a homicide suspect from a wanted poster
distributed to officers that morning—right down to his red leather Pelle
Pelle jacket. Here again the judge saw a reasonable stop and even a
reasonable frisk, but a frisk that went too far and created another
alleged Fourth Amendment violation.
In other stop instances, the judge makes clear that she ruled for the
plaintiffs simply because she did not believe the police. Abandoning
her pose of impartiality, the judge concludes her opinion with an appeal
to the authority of—not the Constitution or some eminent jurist—but a
newspaper column about Trayvon Martin.
Judge Scheindlin's bias shines through,
though even she declined to ban stop-question-and-frisk in toto.
Instead, she will impose a new police monitor, on top of the nine that
already exist (two independent city agencies plus seven prosecutors).
And she will force some police to wear cameras on the beat so she and
others can micromanage police behavior.
NY Post, an eight paragraph editorial:
Death Wish, the Sequel
None of this comes as a surprise. Scheindlin has long been vocal
about her opposition to stop-and-frisk. She has always harbored deep
misgivings about the police. Even before the trial began, she cited
“powerful evidence of a widespread pattern of unlawful stops” and
blasted the NYPD’s “deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers’ most
fundamental constitutional rights.”
As Mayor Bloomberg noted,
Judge Scheindlin’s tipping of the scales of justice here also include
offering “strategic advice” to the plaintiffs to ensure she
would get to hear their case. When the trial did begin, she promptly
disregarded evidence showing stop-and-frisk to be a life-saving police
tool. As she did when the plaintiffs, who were supposed to be victims of
stop-and-frisk, gave testimony exonerating the cops.
That’s not
all she ignored to get to the decision she wanted. In New York, the
percentages of stops by race align squarely with the racial percentages
of crime suspects. In addition, a majority of the “racist” cops are
themselves minorities. Not to mention that 97 percent of shooting
victims are also black or Hispanic.
The Daily News, 18 paragraphs further crush her decision with facts - and they actually refer to the Judge as a dilettante:
City at Risk
She convicted the department of massive, long-term “deliberate
indifference” to civil liberties as the police achieved the most
successful, life-saving crime reductions in American, if not world,
history. Her opinion is a 195-page scream of self-righteous ideology.
Most galling about Scheindlin’s “deliberate indifference” libel is that
she’s the guilty party. By imposing a monitor on the NYPD, she has
rushed headlong into commandeering how the department polices the city
with, she admitted, no concern about endangering life and limb.
Make no mistake — Scheindlin has put New York directly in harm’s way
with a ruling that threatens to push the city back toward the ravages of
lawlessness and bloodshed.
Only the NY Times - Surprise! - agrees:
Racial Discrimination in Stop-and-Frisk
Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court in New York upheld the bedrock principle of individual liberty on Monday
when she ruled that the tactics underlying New York City’s
stop-and-frisk program violated the constitutional rights of minority
citizens. She found that the city had been “deliberately indifferent” to police officers illegally detaining and frisking minority residents on the streets over many years.
And suddenly the NY Times is interested in the Constitution -
He (Bloomberg) has promised to appeal, but, fortunately, he will be leaving City
Hall soon. His successor should retract the appeal and begin the process
of bringing New York City’s police practices in line with the
Constitution.
Here's the front of this AM's Daily News -
“The advantages of Christian females began at birth. Infanticide
was widely practiced by Greco-Romans, and it was especially female
infants who were dispatched. A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it
possible to reconstruct six hundred families. Of these, only six had
raised more than one daughter. As would be expected, the bias against
female infants showed up dramatically in the sex ratios of the imperial
population. It is estimated that there were 131 males per 100 females in
the city of Rome, and 140 males per 100 females elsewhere in the
Empire.”
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