Gettin’ It Dunn: Christopher Dunn Leaves the NYCLU After Three Decades

After 29 years fighting for New Yorkers’ civil rights and liberties, NYCLU Legal Director Christopher Dunn stepped down from his position on December 31.

Chris became the legal director in 2019 after having served as the associate legal director from 2002 to 2019. Prior to joining the NYCLU in 1996, Chris was an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Children’s Rights Project at the national office and before that he worked at the ACLU’s DC affiliate. In all, Chris worked for more than 40 years at the ACLU or one of its affiliates.

At the NYCLU, Chris oversaw numerous landmark cases, including litigation that confronted the Giuliani administration’s crackdown on dissent, challenged the mass arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention, reformed the provision of public defense, helped curtail stop-and-frisk in New York City, limited the use of solitary confinement in state prisons, secured the release of large numbers of noncitizens held in immigration detention during the first Trump administration, and more.

An Historic Career

Chris’ fingerprints are all over the history of the NYCLU during the last three decades. It is impossible to list all of the work he’s done over the years, but a few highlights include:

• Many of the 34 First Amendment cases the NYCLU filed against Rudy Giuliani’s attack on protest and criticism of his administration, including:
  • Housing Works, Inc. v. Safir, challenging the constitutionality of NYPD policies limiting press conferences, rallies, and demonstrations on the steps of New York City Hall.
  • Latino Officers Association v. Safir, challenging the NYPD’s efforts to prevent officers from speaking out against racial-profiling and one of many cases challenging the Giuliani Administration’s attempts to silence criticism by city employees.
  • Walton v. Safir, challenging the firing of a Black police officer who spoke publicly about racial profiling by the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit after officers in the unit shot and killed Amadou Diallo.
  • Metropolitan Council v. Safir, challenging the NYPD’s policy of refusing to allow homelessness protesters to lie and sleep symbolically on the city sidewalk outside Gracie Mansion.
  • United Yellow Cab Drivers Assoc. v. Safir, challenging the NYPD’s blockade of East River bridges and tunnels to prevent yellow cabs from protesting.
  • Picture the Homeless v. City of New York, challenging the NYPD policy of targeting and arresting unhoused people.
  • Numerous cases protecting the right of New Yorkers to protest, including Schiller v. City of New York/Dinler v. City of New York, challenging mass arrests, prolonged detentions, and blanket fingerprinting of protesters and bystanders at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
  • MacWade v. Kelly, challenging NYPD policy and practice of conducting suspicionless searches of subway riders.
  • Ligon v. City of New York, challenging NYPD trespass stops of people in or near residential buildings enrolled in the City’s so-called “Clean Halls” program. The case helped lead to a dramatic reduction in the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisks.
  • Peoples v. Annucci, challenging solitary confinement in New York prisons. The case resulted in a settlement that significantly reformed and reduced the use of solitary in state prisons.
• Cases attacking the first Trump Administration’s deportation machine:
  • Abdi v. Duke, challenging the blanket denial of parole and bond hearings to arriving asylum-seekers held in the ICE detention facility in Batavia, New York.
  • L.V.M. v. Lloyd, challenging the prolonged detention of immigrant children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
  • Duchitanga v. Lloyd, which challenged lengthy delays in the release of immigrant children from government custody caused by burdensome changes to federal fingerprint policy.
• A series of amicus briefs challenging the death penalty in New York, including Hynes v. Tomeii, People of State of New York v. Harris, and People of State of New York v. Cahill.

Each of these cases has its own backstory, historical significance, and impact on New Yorkers. But in the interest of space, we’ll take a deeper look at just one – Chris’ work to curtail the use of stop-and-frisk.

Stop-and-Frisk

Often associated with “broken windows policing” – a policing philosophy that allowing people to commit small crimes leads people to commit larger crimes – stop-and-frisk is the practice of stopping and searching a person based on little more than an officer’s suspicions. As practiced in New York and many other major American cities, stop-and-frisk targeted vast numbers of people of color who had engaged in no unlawful activity.

The NYCLU knew the NYPD was over-relying on stop-and-frisk and that the department was violating people’s rights – especially Black and brown New Yorkers – but the scope of the problem was kept under wraps by the NYPD. Through advocacy with the City Council, Chris pressured the NYPD to first release stop-and-frisk numbers in 2007 revealing the number of stops had soared above 500,000. He then successfully sued the NYPD to obtain the electronic database it maintained of stops, which led to a 2012 report Chris authored that exposed the dramatic and discriminatory expansion of stop-and-frisk during the Bloomberg Administration. After the NYPD refused to release its database of stop-and-frisk activity, Chris led the legal team in a lawsuit against the department. As a result of pressure from the NYCLU and others, in 2008 the NYPD released the database.

In 2013 Chris led the team that sued the NYPD over stop-and-frisk activity at thousands of private apartment buildings across the city that had enrolled in a special NYPD program. That case, Ligon v. the City of New York, joined two other pending federal cases challenging other parts of the stop-and-frisk program.  In 2017 the NYLCU reached a settlement with the NYPD that severely limited police stops at private buildings participating in the program, required officers to document every stop; mandated extensive training for officers involved in the program; tightened restrictions in which buildings could be enrolled in the program; and provided federal monitoring for at least three years (which continues to this day).

“Today’s settlement is another major step toward dismantling the NYPD’s abusive stop-and-frisk regime,” Chris said when the settlement was announced. “Under Operation Clean Halls, tens of thousands of building residents, most of whom are Black and Latino, were under siege in their own homes, and visitors also were routinely stopped, frisked and arrested. This settlement will put an end to those abuses.”

As a result of the work of the NYCLU and other advocates, NYPD stops dropped precipitously after reaching an historical high of nearly 700,000 in 2011. In recent years, the number of reported stops has hovered around 20,000.

A Lasting Legacy

Chris was a mentor to many NYCLU litigators throughout his career, but his wisdom and guidance was felt across the organization. His ability to distill key arguments, ask tough questions, weigh evidence for and against a given claim, and see all sides of an issue were invaluable skills that Chris brought to the job. We will miss Chris and we wish him well as he pursues his longtime interest in urban planning.