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Photo by: Pearl Gabel
City Limits has teamed up with The Nation to cover the first 100 days of the de Blasio administration. Click here to read the series.
On Thursday the legal war over the NYPD’s “stop, question and frisk” policy—which resulted in the questioning of hundreds of thousands of innocent people over the years—ended. Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to settle the case along the lines set out this summer when a federal judge ruled the policy had been carried out unconstitutionally: A court-appointed monitor will oversee the City’s reform of the policy, and the City will engage community members in the reform process.
The announcement was more epilogue than earthquake. The landslide election of de Blasio, whose surge at the end of a long Democratic primary campaign was fueled in part by a brilliant TV ad addressing stop-and-frisk, the fate of the controversial and ineffective program. The court decision, which was briefly marred by a judicial review board criticizing the judge and removing her from the case (only to backtrack a few weeks later), was an earlier nail in the coffin. But the real end of stop-and-frisk as we knew it came months earlier.
Read more at The Nation.