That’s because they have devolved into a method of indirect racial profiling, with police stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white,” according to The New York Times.
The judge issued the ruling in the context of deciding the 2008 class-action lawsuit Floyd v. City of New York, for which a two-month nonjury trial was held in Federal District Court in Manhattan earlier this year. The judge—who did not order an end to the stop-and-frisk practice, but called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms—noted that about 83% of the stops between 2004 and 2012 involved blacks and Hispanics, even though those two demographics make up just slightly more than 50% of the city’s residents.