Lawsuit Claims Stop-and-Frisks Target Minorities in the City

The New York Police Department's practice of stopping and questioning passersby is being challenged in federal court by civil rights groups that allege the police are targeting minorities and are compiling a database of people who get stopped.

Yesterday, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on behalf of a crime reporter at the New York Post, Leonardo Blair, who claims to have been stopped near his aunt's home in the Bronx last November. Mr. Blair, who is from the island of Jamaica, believes he was singled out because he is black, according to the suit.

In January, a different Manhattan-based rights group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, sued the NYPD over the stop-and-frisk program. The number of stop-and-frisks has soared in recent years, to 508,540 in 2006 from 97,296 in 2002.

Critics of the police department have argued that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately stopped, but police officials have defended the high proportion of minorities stopped by saying that they are more likely to be named as suspects in crimes.

"The data indicates no racial bias in the stops, but it does show a relationship between the percentage of individuals stopped and the descriptions of suspects," a spokesman for the police department, Assistant Chief Michael Collins, said in a statement earlier this month in which he also cited a recent study by the Rand Corp., a think tank, that found no racial bias in police stop-and-frisk practices.

The suit alleges that the NYPD is compiling information on those subject to stop-and-frisks and asks the court to order the NYPD to expunge the database.

Mr. Blair was arrested without reason, the suit claims. After being brought to a holding cell at the 49th precinct, he was released after telling officers that he was a reporter and had a master's degree from Columbia University.

The complaint states that initially Mr. Blair did not honestly answer a question from the two officers who approached him: When asked whether he spoke English, Mr. Blair answered in Spanish that he did not.

"Police acted appropriately with someone who claimed falsely he didn't speak English and refused to identify himself to the officers, one of whom was black and the other was Hispanic," a police spokesman, Paul Browne, wrote in an e-mail message.