Vol. 74/No. 44      November 22, 2010

“These unconstitutional actions have had and continue to have a devastating effect on the lives of many Philadelphians,” said Paul Messing, one of the attorneys who filed the suit. They “subject innocent people to humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Using the cops’ own statistics, the lawsuit states that in 2009 there were 253,333 “stop and frisk” operations, an increase of 148 percent since 2005. Of these, 72 percent targeted African Americans. Philadelphia is 44 percent Black. Only 8 percent of the stops, according to police figures, resulted in arrests.

“Most of those arrests had nothing to do with the reason they were stopped,” Messing said. “The charges were often for disorderly conduct because they complained they were stopped for no reason.”

The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, attorneys from the well-known civil liberties firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, as well as a law professor from the University of Pennsylvania.

Plaintiffs include eight Black and Latino men subjected to unwarranted stops and searches. The class-action lawsuit seeks to represent tens of thousands of others who have been mistreated this way but were not in a position to sue for themselves. This would open the door to a blanket injunction against the cops, in addition to money damages.

Philadelphia cops have a long history of racist, anti-working-class attacks and systematic violations of constitutional rights. In 1995, in what became known as the 39th District scandal, a large-scale operation run by a gang of cops in North Philadelphia, a largely Black area, was exposed. That led to the revelation of hundreds of instances of “beating, robbing, lying and planting phony evidence,” reported the New York Times. The revelations led to the reopening of hundreds of frame-up convictions with many being thrown out, and forced the city to pay more than $6 million to victims. The widespread publicity pushed back the cops’ ability to ride roughshod over working-class areas in the city.

In 1996, on the heels of these exposures, the city and the cops were sued for systematically targeting Blacks and Latinos and found guilty. That suit was won by some of the same lawyers bringing the legal challenge filed this week.

As part of the settlement, the city had to maintain and turn over to the lawyers who prosecuted them records of cop stops and their results. David Rudovsky, an attorney both in the 1996 case and the one filed this week, said that these reports enabled them to focus public attention on the fact that the cops continued to arbitrarily stop and search people, particularly in Black and Latino areas.

Michael Nutter, elected Philadelphia mayor in 2008, brought in a new police chief, Charles Ramsey, and together they initiated a new, expanded “stop, question and frisk” program. The November 4 lawsuit is against Ramsey, the city, and a number of city cops.

The suit cites the specific experiences of eight people who were unconstitutionally stopped and harassed by the cops, including a garment worker, a pharmaceutical worker, a carpenter, a city worker, a lawyer, an ethnographer from the University of Pennsylvania, and a state representative.

The specific instances include both cases of unwarranted stops, physical abuse, being thrown into and held in squad cars, and other harassment, as well as victimization for speaking up to protest assaults against others.

Similar lawsuits are being prosecuted in other cities including New York. In an October 29 column in the New York Times, Bob Herbert said that New York cops “are encouraged to trample on the rights of black and Hispanic New Yorkers by relentlessly enforcing the city’s degrading, unlawful and outright racist stop-and-frisk policy.”
 
 
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