“Leave me alone.”
This is what Devin Almonor said when NYPD officers stopped him and threw him against a car. As he testified during the stop-and-frisk trial, I positioned myself so he could easily see me. I spent hours helping him prepare to testify. I was a senior attorney on the case and he, a lanky young Black man in his church suit, was an innocent kid.
“I just want to do the right thing.”
This is what NYPD officer Pedro Serrano said from the same witness stand days later. As Serrano told the judge about pressure on officers to profile people of color, he, a stout middle-aged Latino man raised in the Bronx, cried.
Our city has suffered murder by and of NYPD blue, and protests on both sides of the blue line leave us in some kind of senseless standoff. In the coming weeks, New York’s police and civilians will have an opportunity to work collaboratively for better. But it will be for naught if New Yorkers do not see how things went wrong.
The NYPD fosters an implicit bias in officers. To train officers on suspicious behavior, the NYPD presents videos depicting Black men wearing hoodies walking through bodegas. Then they show pictures of wallets and cellphones containing miniature guns, even though such weapons are rare.
The NYPD relies on supervisors to correct officer misbehavior, but sergeants often look the other way or encourage discriminatory conduct. One sergeant testified that in two decades as a supervisor, he never discussed stops with subordinates. Officers under his watch stopped Cornelio McDonald as he crossed the street. It was cold that night so McDonald put his hands in his pockets. A van of officers pulled up, saying the bulge in his pocket looked like a gun. They detained and questioned him.
The sergeant later admitted this stop appeared unlawful. He signed off on it anyway.
Another sergeant, captured on audio recording, implored officers to make stops. “You aren’t working in Midtown Manhattan,” he said. “You’re in Bed-Stuy, where everyone’s probably got a warrant.”
Bed-Stuy is a predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn. The majority of people there are law-abiding.
The NYPD’s leaders instructed officers to target police activity toward Blacks and Latinos. The commissioner, the chief, deputies and commanding officers demanded summonses, arrests and stops of “the right people.” They made known that “the right people” meant “young men of color.” Officers who failed to comply faced adverse consequences.
Officers who violated people’s rights, in contrast, routinely faced no consequences. When the Civilian Complaint Review Board finds that an officer abused his authority, the NYPD regularly refuses to pursue discipline. When the CCRB recommends the most serious punishment, the NYPD prescribes the least serious, if it punishes at all.
The majority of victims in CCRB stop complaints are Black, year after year. During the trial, I asked the department advocate responsible for NYPD discipline whether this racial imbalance concerned her. It did not.
The court found in 2013 that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice violated the Constitution. It ordered the parties to develop remedies through a process that includes input from community stakeholders most affected by unlawful stops. The remedies must be designed to repair the institutional problems—bias, training, supervision, quotas, discipline—that caused racial discrimination in the stop-and-frisk practice.
Importantly, NYPD officers will also have a say in the collaborative process. Racial profiling hurts them too. Many, like Serrano, are desperate to be judged by how much they help rather than how much they target.
This process was on hold until recently. With the number of stops declining even before the policing slowdown, you might believe the NYPD voluntarily changed its practices after trial. Put aside that the decline was at least partly because officers were told not to document all stops (we adduced evidence of that at trial). The NYPD ignored public outcry about racial profiling for more than 14 years, and now officers are protesting calls for change. New Yorkers cannot leave the NYPD to fix itself.
Last week, the city and plaintiffs met with a court-appointed monitor to discuss remedies. They will soon begin the collaborative process. History shows that community engagement is necessary for lasting police reform. The collaborative process must be transparent and provide real opportunities for community members to participate. The remedies developed must incorporate people’s feedback.
I speak about the trial to groups of Black and Latino students at schools around the city—Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx. I tell them about Almonor, Serrano and potential change. Every time, a student asks why I do this work. I suppose they’re wondering because I’m white. I say what happens to my neighbors happens to me, then I say, “Look for information about the collaborative process and be there.”
Let’s right this together.
Jenn Rolnick Borchetta is a counsel at Demos and senior counsel on the Floyd v. City of New York stop-and-frisk case.
