Your Papers Please. [2]

I don’t know how many of you read about a judge ordering New York City to change their policy on Stop & Frisk. The New York City police were stopping youth and frisking them based on their minority status and included in the group were trans-people. The New York Times reported back in April that,

Here is a vignette from March 2013: A 24-year-old gay man named Yhatzine Lafontain is leaving a restaurant late at night with a friend on Roosevelt Avenue and 95th Street in Queens. Both are dressed as women, Mr. Lafontain in a jacket, short dress and heels. Exchanging goodbyes outside, they are approached by a man who tells them they look good.

In Mr. Lafontain’s account, they chatted briefly to avoid seeming rude and the man departed. Within a few minutes, an undercover police officer approached Mr. Lafontain and his friend and arrested them, suspecting them of prostitution. “We were surprised,” Mr. Lafontain told me, “because we had never talked to anyone about sex or money.”
[…]
Last week, Mitchyll Mora, a youth leader at a group called Streetwise and Safe told me about an experience he had last spring, on his way to a poetry reading on the Lower East Side. Dressed in a style he called non-gender-conforming — makeup, boots, long earrings — he was stopped and searched by the police for no reason he could understand. The police made him throw his hands up against the wall, invoked a gay slur and grabbed his buttocks, he said. “I should have tried to file a report, but it’s hard to feel empowered in this kind of situation,” he said.
[…]
Two years ago, Ms. Ritchie settled a lawsuit against the Police Department for a transgender client, Ryhannah Combs, who was arrested on suspicion of prostitution while making her way to a McDonald’s in the Village. The complaint said the police had listed nine condoms among her possessions even though Ms. Combs was not carrying any at the time of her arrest.

Last week a Federal Judge said that the way the NYPD was conducting the “Stop & Frisk” was unconstitutional.

‘Stop and frisk’: why a judge ruled the New York tactic unconstitutional (+video)
The judge in the stop-and-frisk decision also appointed an independent monitor to ensure that the New York Police Department’s practices would be in line with constitutional standards in the future.
Christian Science Monitor
By Harry Bruinius, Staff writer
August 12, 2013

In a blow to the administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a federal judge declared on Monday that the city’s long-contentious police tactic known as “stop and frisk” violated the constitutional rights of perhaps millions of citizens.
[…]
Judge Scheindlin, appointed by President Clinton in 1994, found the city’s practices did not meet the “reasonable suspicion” standard set by the US Supreme Court, which allows police to stop people if they believe criminal activity “may be afoot.” This is a lower standard than “probable cause,” the most well-known standard in the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

"They have received both actual and constructive notice since at least 1999 of widespread Fourth Amendment violations occurring as a result of the NYPD's stop and frisk practices,” the judge wrote in her 195-page ruling. “Despite this notice, they deliberately maintained and even escalated policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread Fourth Amendment violations."

The judge also found that the city was profiling racial minorities, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s "equal protection" clause.

Besides racial profiling the police were stopping and frisking trans-people and arresting them on prostitution if they carried condoms. Anyone who was a teenager knows that you always carry condoms just in case you got lucky but in NYC that practice could get you arrested for prostitution. Also many AIDS/HIV clinics hand out safe sex packages and carrying one of those could also lead to an arrest under the old guidelines.