New York City's entire population is being marked as criminal suspects under 'Stop & Frisk' program
New York - City officials will no longer store the names and addresses of people whose cases are dismissed after a police stop under an agreement that settles a lawsuit over the stop-and-frisk issue.
The deal signed Tuesday resulted from a May 2010 lawsuit brought in state court in Manhattan by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The civil rights group announced the settlement Wednesday, saying the New York Police Department will no longer store the names of people who are stopped, arrested or issued a summons when those cases are dismissed or resolved with a fine for a noncriminal violation.
“Though much still needs to be done, this settlement is an important step toward curbing the impact of abusive stop-and-frisk practices,” said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the NYCLU and lead counsel in the case.
“The problem with the database was that it had hundreds of thousands of people in who had never committed any crime and yet the department was using the database to conduct criminal investigations,” Dunn told WCBS 880′s Marla Diamond.
Dunn added the majority of people in the database were black and Hispanic males.
“An entire population is being marked as criminal suspects merely because they’ve been stopped and frisked,” he told Diamond.
The deal resulted from a lawsuit brought on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people whose personal information was in a stop-and-frisk database.
“New Yorkers who are the victims of unjustified police stops will no longer suffer the further injustice of having their personal information stored indefinitely in an NYPD database,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a news release.
“This settlement finally clears the names of hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime was that they were stopped and frisked by NYPD officers,” she said.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/08/07/under-agreement-nypd-to-stop-storing-names-of-those-stopped-and-frisked/