The New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a Brooklyn man who has been the repeated victim of racial profiling at NYPD subway bag search checkpoints. J. Sultan, a 32-year-old native New Yorker of Kashmiri descent, has been stopped and searched by police officers 21 times since the NYPD initiated the subway checkpoint program in 2005. Most white New Yorkers have been stopped rarely, if at all. Sultan’s South Asian appearance is the only factor that can explain this persistent targeting by police officers.
J. Sultan, a 32-year-old native New Yorker of Kashmiri descent, has been stopped and searched by police officers 21 times since the NYPD initiated the subway checkpoint program in 2005. Most white New Yorkers have been stopped rarely, if at all. Sultan’s South Asian appearance is the only factor that can explain this persistent targeting by police officers.
“The NYPD’s racial profiling has disrupted Mr. Sultan’s life making every subway trip a source of anxiety,” said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director. “The NYPD must be held accountable for repeatedly singling out an innocent, hardworking young man for humiliating bag searches. Sadly, his experience is not surprising. The subway bag search program purports to be random but it is set up to invite police officers to engage in racial discrimination.”
The lawsuit maintains that Sultan’s constitutional rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments were violated and names NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and the City of New York as defendants.
As part of the subway program, the NYPD at any given time places checkpoints in a tiny percent of the approximately 1,000 subway entrances throughout the city. Officers manning checkpoints ostensibly select passengers for bag searches on a numerical basis. The officers decide at the start of a checkpoint what fraction of passengers to search, for example every 25th person. The likelihood that Sultan would be stopped 21 times from July 2005 to June 2008 on the basis of this numerical system is about 1 in 165 million.
Sultan is a manager at a Brooklyn hospital. During his commute, he typically carries a bag large enough to hold his laptop and sometimes a gym bag. He relies on the subway to get to work, go to the gym, and visit friends and relatives throughout the city. Sultan worries that the hundreds of people who have watched him being searched, including his neighbors, will assume that he is a terrorist. The experience has deeply disturbed Sultan. He continues to feel anxious when he sees a checkpoint or police officers in the subway.
“It is demeaning and degrading to be targeted because of my skin color,” Sultan said. “It saddens me to be treated like less than a full American citizen. I just want equality: no more, no less. I believe in the need for anti-terrorism measures, but I don’t support city-sponsored racial profiling.”
After the 13th time he was stopped and searched, Sultan filed a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board. He filed more complaints as the stops continued, routinely recording the names and badge numbers of the officers who stopped him. In June 2008, he sent a letter to Mayor Bloomberg seeking help in ending the NYPD’s racial profiling. He also sent letters to other elected officials and lodged a complaint to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly through the NYPD’s web site. To his knowledge, these letters and messages resulted in no action to stop racial profiling at the subway checkpoints.
Flaws in the checkpoint program’s design invite racial profiling. The NYPD explicitly forbids checkpoint officers from recording any demographic information about the people they select. This is in stark contrast to the Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, which requires officers to report the race of every person stopped outside of the subway checkpoint program. The policy of not recording demographic information about those selected for subway searches ensures that the NYPD will be unable to detect or correct racial profiling by officers.
“The subway search program’s design opens the door to racial profiling and guarantees that officers can profile with impunity,” said Christopher Dunn, NYCLU associate legal director and lead counsel on this case. “The Department must establish clear policies and procedures to ensure that race plays no role in determining who gets stopped at subway checkpoints.”
The lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction requiring the NYPD to implement better training, supervision and monitoring to eliminate the possibility of racial profiling. It also asks the court to require the NYPD to collect racial data of all persons stopped at subway checkpoints.
Also serving as counsel on the case are NYU Civil Rights Clinic students Elizabeth Mosher, Amalea Smirniotopoulos and Erin Simon.
