UNITED STATES - New york police target Caribbean youth

NEW YORK (CMC):

A high-ranking New York Police Department (NYPD) officer has acknowledged setting monthly quotas for summonses, arrests and stop and frisks of Caribbean and other minority youths while heading a Brooklyn, New York police precinct.

"I set a standard that said 'do your job or suffer the consequences'," Deputy Chief Michael Marino admitted on the stand in Manhattan Federal District Court during a class-action lawsuit challenging the NYPD's controversial stop-and frisk tactics as racial profiling.

Violated state Laws

In 2006, a New York State arbitrator ruled that Marino's quotas in the 75th Police Precinct in the East New York section of Brooklyn violated state labour law, and ordered them to end.

In the class-action lawsuit, Judge Shira Scheindlin has been asked to rule on the constitutionality of the practice and could order changes if the NYPD fails to convince her that the stops were not illegal.

Marino testified when he arrived at the 75th Precinct in 2002, he discovered that each police officer was writing only five summonses a month.

He said that level of activity was so low that it was detrimental to the community.

He said he, therefore, ordered the officers to write 10 summonses, make one arrest and conduct two "good" stop and frisks each month.

"I did set numbers for them that would serve the community in a better manner," Marino testified under questioning.

Marino is also one of the defendants in a US$50-million lawsuit filed by police officer Adrian Schoolcraft.

Schoolcraft claims that Marino and other police officers took him to a psychiatric ward to discredit his claims of quotas in 2008 against Caribbean immigrants and other minorities.

Meantime, another police officer had also caught a top Bronx police officer on tape telling him to specifically target "male blacks 14 to 21" for stop and frisk because they commit crimes.