The Legal Aid Society, together with co-counsel at the NAACP LDF and a coalition of advocates, has filed a motion calling for substantial changes to federal monitorship overseeing the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk and trespass enforcement practices, as reported by the Associated Press.

Following a 2013 court decision in Floyd v. the City of New York that found the NYPD’s practices of stop-and-frisk were unconstitutional and settlement of a case, Davis v. City of New York challenging stop, search and arrest practices targeting public housing residents, a federal monitor was installed to oversee the NYPD and ensure racial profiling and unconstitutional stops and arrests of New Yorkers would finally end. But to this day, Black, Latinx, and other New Yorkers of color continue to be disproportionately targeted by the NYPD and the NYPD fails to document many potentially unlawful stops.

Part of the problem is that the perspectives of people who experience abusive policing practices have been largely shut out of the remedies process by the NYPD and the Monitor, depriving the Monitor of important information and limiting the capacity of the monitorship to engaging in meaningful reforms that answer the concerns of impacted communities. Today’s filing seeks to improve the process for remedying these problems by ensuring that community perspectives are better accounted for.

“There has been a disconnect and a drift of this reform process run by the monitor and the impacted communities — the people who are experiencing these patterns of police activity,” said Corey Stoughton, Attorney-in-Charge of the Law Reform and Special Litigation Unit for the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society.