1,000s of NYC Stop-&-Frisks Unjustified, Law Prof Finds; City Argues He Was Paid $375/Hour to Say So
Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been stopped and frisked without adequate, documented legal justification over the past six years, a Columbia University law professor says in a study conducted for an ongoing civil rights case.
In a report written for the Center for Constitutional Rights, professor Jeffrey Fagan also cites racial profiling as a common problem underlying many of the unnecessary stops, reports the New York Times.
However, the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, contends that the racial characteristics of those stopped correlates with the racial characteristics of suspects. He also says the professor was paid to come up with a study that put the New York Police Department, which is being sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a bad light, the newspaper reports.
“This is a document prepared for plaintiffs who paid that amount of money to have this document prepared,” Kelly told the Times, saying that Fagan was paid $375 an hour to prepare the report. “If you pay that kind of money, you’re going to get a viewpoint that pretty much goes along with your view point.”
The city, he admits, has retained a professor at New York University to prepare a competing report.
