By The Editors

If you’re black or Hispanic and live in New York City public housing, chances are great you’ve been stopped by police officers on suspicion that you’re trespassing for no reason other than you’re black or Hispanic.

If you’re black or Hispanic and visiting friends or relatives who live in New York City public housing, chances are great you’ve been stopped by police officers on suspicion that you’re trespassing for no reason other than you’re black or Hispanic.

If you’re black or Hispanic and are stopped in a New York City public housing building by police officers, chances are great that you’ll be arrested and charged with trespassing for no reason other than you’re black or Hispanic.

Those are the primary charges made in a federal class-action lawsuit filed against the New York City government and the New York City Housing Authority last week by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Legal Aid Society of New York City, and the private law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP. It urges the court to declare the police practices unconstitutional, order that they be halted immediately and award compensatory damages to the named plaintiffs in the suit.

The lawsuit claims that the city’s policing practices in its public housing developments – most notably, its “vertical sweeps” of buildings — “routinely” subject residents and those who visit them to illegal stops and false arrests that serve no lawful purpose. It states that the number of these vertical patrols, which are conducted by both the Housing Authority’s police force and the New York City police force, has approached 200,000 a year in recent years.

That has resulted in thousands of residents of these buildings and visitors to them being stopped and/or arrested on trespass charges, the suit claims. For example, it states that the number of police stops inside housing authority buildings increased almost 50% from 2004 to 2008, the last year for which figures are available. The number of official arrests on trespassing charges has increased over 36% during the same time period.

That increase cannot be explained by the incidence of crime that occurs with the housing developments, the lawsuit alleges. It asserts that the rate of trespass stops, arrests and enforcement in predominantly black and Hispanic housing developments is roughly three times higher than in surrounding areas with similar crime rates.

These arrests, tenants advocates and attorneys involved in the suit said, have often resulted in individuals missing work or even losing their jobs altogether. Equally damaging, they assert, is the sense of siege from the police public housing tenants have come to feel. Some tenants who are named plaintiffs in the suit have said friends and relatives have stopped visiting them because they fear being harassed by police officers.

That feeling prompted the official citywide public housing tenants organization to declare last November that the police tactics have provoked “growing concern and perception among the residents [of public housing] that we are living in penal colonies instead of public housing communities.”

Those words came in a statement issued by the Citywide Council of Presidents of the New York City Public Housing Authority as it met with New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to discuss the police program. It went on to declare that tenants’ perception they are under siege by the police “is being fueled by an almost daily litany of events where law enforcement personnel in the line of duty use unprofessional language, insulting comments and abrasive/physical interdictions of civilians on public housing grounds.”

City officials have declined to comment on the lawsuit.

John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that “the effects of crime exact a particularly high toll on the city’s African-American and Latino residents, but the NYPD’s pattern of flagrant constitutional violations compounds rather than alleviates the communities’ injuries. In our nation, there are some means of law enforcement which are simply not lawful.”

The New York City Housing Authority oversees 2,600 buildings in 340 housing developments spread across the city. They contain a population of more than 400,000 people, 95 percent of whom are black or Hispanic.

According to the lawsuit, the vertical patrol effort, begun in 1991 to eliminate crime within housing authority buildings, has become a massive city-run program of unconstitutional police actions in communities of color. Police officers stop and arrest individuals on no basis other than their race and ethnicity. The lawsuit states that the police guidelines for the stops and arrests don’t require officers “to identify individualized, objective facts supporting suspicion that criminal activity is afoot” on the part of anyone they stop or arrest and don’t even specify “criteria for determining who is – and who is not – an ‘unauthorized person’” in terms of being in a public housing building.

Steven Banks, LAS Attorney-in-Chief, said, “Our clients are New Yorkers stopped and arrested while trying to go about their everyday lives. They are visiting friends; dropping off children; or caring for elderly or sick relatives.” NYCHA building residents do not surrender their rights when they sign a lease, and they should not be arrested and drive up the cost of the criminal justice system.”