NYPD Stop and Frisk Policy: Blind Man Becomes First to Sue After Court Ruling
A legally blind Queens resident is suing New York City for its highly controversial Stop and Frisk law in the first lawsuit since a federal court ruled the law unconstitutional earlier this month.
According to court documents, Allen Moye was waiting for a friend on W. 118th street in Harlem back in 2010 "when the police suddenly approached him... without either consent, an arrest warrant, a lawful search warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion that [he] had committed a crime."
Moye, who is black, claimed to The New York Post that he was profiled when police went through his clothes and refused to tell him what he was being charged with when they arrested him. He told the New York Daily News that the system reflects a new Jim Crow era.
"It was racial profiling, what they did," Moye said Thursday. "They try to put everybody behind bars to do their work."
"The police asked Allen what he was doing there and snatched his identification from him, and when Allen complained the police spoke rudely to him and placed him under arrest," the documents also said.
The charges against Moye, which were later learned to be credit card forgery according to The New York Daily News, were dropped in 2011. But Moye is not finished. In his lawsuit, he named detective Roger Mooyoung and five other cops from the narcotics squad as the people who conducted an "unlawful search" and carried out a "false arrest."
The incident is one of many that led to the Aug. 12 court decision, which said "the NYPD had violated the rights of thousands of citizens with respect to the application of its 'stop-and-frisk' policy."
According to the New York Post, the city's law department is looking over the lawsuit.
The New York Civil Liberties Union website says that 89 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked in 2012 were totally innocent. A full 87 percent were black or Latino while only 10 percent were white.
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