Not my job: stop-frisk watchdog

The court-appointed watchdog overseeing the NYPD’s reform of stop-and-frisk is reluctant to say whether cops exercise racial bias in enforcement of social distancing and the recent citywide curfew.

Federal monitor Peter Zimroth has limited jurisdiction and resources to tackle racial disparities in arrests related to coronavirus and demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd, a lawyer for Zimroth wrote in a letter filed in Manhattan Federal Court.

“Plaintiffs [those challenging city stop-and-frisk practices] have not shown that the City is using a policy related to stop and frisk in enforcing the COVID Rules,” wrote Zimroth lawyer Benjamin Gruenstein.

“The Monitor does not have freestanding power to assess the ‘legality’ of the City’s actions,” says the letter filed Thursday.

Civil rights lawyers want Zimroth to investigate why blacks and Hispanics made up an overwhelming majority of those issued summonses and arrested for violating social distancing rules.

“Over the past few months, the NYPD has engaged in what appears to be a widespread practice of racially discriminatory and racially selective law enforcement, analogous and in fact identical to the racially discriminatory practice of stopand-frisk,” lawyer Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights said last month.

The lawyers later asked Zimroth to expand the inquiry to include enforcement of the curfew imposed amid rowdy protests around the city in late May and early June. Mayor de Blasio lifted the curfew on June 7.

“Now is not the time to test Plaintiffs’ hypothesis that City employees who lack training in race-neutral law enforcement would enforce the COVID Rules effectively and neutrally,” Zimroth’s lawyer wrote in the letter.