Philadelphia police settle lawsuit over their "Stop & Frisk" policy.

PHILADELPHIA - A federal judge this week approved a settlement to a federal class action that accused Philadelphia police of targeting black and Latino men for unconstitutional searches on the street.

The practice, colloquially known as "stop and frisk," was the subject of a November 2010 class action brought by eight black and Latino men against the city and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

Those men, which included an attorney, a University of Pennsylvania ethnographer and a state lawmaker, claimed that they were baselessly stopped - either while driving or as pedestrians - and in some cases taken into police custody, primarily because of the color of their skin.

Some of the stops resulted in minor charges - failure to disperse, driving with overly tinted windows - that were subsequently dismissed, according to the suit.

In other cases, no formal charges were brought, court papers show.
U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell certified a class in the settlement agreement signed Tuesday, and said qualified members of the class can sue for damages.

The Philadelphia Police Department has weathered similar accusations of racial profiling and other discriminatory conduct in past years.

A 1996 settlement in NAACP et al. v. City of Philadelphia brought about sweeping changes aimed at addressing alleged racially biased policing. That case involved minority Philadelphians claiming that they were targeted for improper narcotics charges and were subjected to police brutality.

Hundreds of convictions were overturned and the city agreed to pay over $6 million to the wrongfully accused, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped litigate the "stop and frisk" suit.

As part of the 1996 settlement, data from thousands of pedestrian and car stops was analyzed to ensure that minority Philadelphians would no longer be subjected to unconstitutional race-based policing.

But "The data compiled by the City continued to show lack of cause for stops, frisks and detentions, and a highly racially disparate impact on African-Americans and Latinos through to 2005, when monitoring of the 1996 Agreement terminated," according to the 2010 suit.

Link: http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/06/24/stopfrisksettlement.pdf