NEW YORK -- A civil liberties group filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the NYPD's practice of stopping hundreds of thousands of people each year for questioning, saying it is racially biased. The New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit lists New York Post reporter Leonardo Blair as the sole plaintiff, saying he was stopped and frisked by police officers as he walked from his car to his Bronx home last November. He was taken to a police station, where officers expressed surprise that though he was black, he was not from "the projects," the lawsuit said. Blair has a master's degree from Columbia University. The lawsuit said the NYPD has stopped people in New York nearly 1 million times over the last two years. It said more than half of the people targeted were black, even though blacks make up only about a quarter of the city's population. It asks that the practice be declared unconstitutional. Kate O'Brien Ahlers, a city law department spokeswoman, said, "We are awaiting the legal papers and will review them thoroughly." The police department has said the racial breakdown of people stopped by police is consistent with the descriptions provided by victims of violent crime. It said an independent study reached the same conclusion: that stops were related to crime conditions rather than race.
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