NYC Police Ordered to cease shady "stop and frisk" arrests

And it only took 34 years.

Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the New York Police Department came forthwith too little, too late when he issued a memo directing officers not to arrest people caught with small amounts of marijuana unless the drug is in plain public view. A 1977 law decriminalized minor possession, yet tens of thousands are arrested every year.

In some assinine loophole not unlike firearms "brandishing" laws cops have been tricking people into showing them the small amount of marijuana in their possession and using that action to lock them up for "brandishing" the drug.

In 2010, more than 50,000 people were arrested for possession of marijuana; a vast majority of them were racial minorities and male. Civil rights lawyers say that many of them were stopped as part of the Police Department’s broad stop-and-frisk practice and were arrested after officers told them to empty their pockets, which brought the drugs into open view.

NYTimes

It only took 34 years for the memo to come down.
Anybody want to start a pool to see how long it will take for these cretins to actually stop?

Anyone who was screwed over by the cops has a long line to wait in for any sort of "justice."

The United States Justice Department and New York lawmakers should investigate the legality of practices that led to the arrests of hundreds of thousands of people since the mid-1990s.

One thing that stands out for me about this is quite often police apologists will pass the blame for their actions onto the public. Saying if we don't like the laws they are simply enforcing we should change them.

Looks like some cops (an entire metropolitan force worth) will go out of their way to lock people up even if the people change the laws. How would they explain away that one? Just doing their job? Obviously not. Unless their job is to lock up as many minority males as possible however they can. Hmmm... maybe that is their job?

You have to be a special kind of lunatic to want to be a cop in NY (post 911) to begin with.
There isn't a cop out there that doesn't know what he or she is really doing by the time they put that uniform on, I studied criminal justice for 2 years and they do a good job at letting you know that the job comes with about a 90% loss of old friends.

They like the power for the most part, and racial profiling is hard to prove too.