All photos by Jon Flanders. You can see more photos here.
Note: People in Albany, NY rallied in support of Dontay Ivy after the police found that nothing was done wrong in his tazing death. Ivy was a schizophrenic black man tazed to death by the police while walking home.
With Dontay Ivy stop, Albany police did do something wrong
In his press conference Wednesday following the announcement that the officers who stopped and tased Dontay Ivy would face no charges, Police Chief Brendan Cox said the “officers did nothing wrong.”
With all due respect to the chief, I believe that’s inaccurate. The officers broke the law by stopping Ivy in the first place.
The laws, and constitutional standards, about when officers can stop citizens were made clear by a recent federal court ruling on New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy.
It’s true that the stop-and-frisk ruling was made by a Southern District judge, so it doesn’t directly apply in Albany. But as Barry Kamins, a former state judge and a columnist for the New York Law Journal, noted, the language above “spells out in great detail the standards enunciated” in a 1968 Supreme Court case.
Also, Kamins said, the rulings “have been the law in this state for over 40 years” and are therefore not new.
I understand that Cox can’t admit officer wrongdoing — not with a civil case looming that the city is sure to settle, because it will almost surely lose in court.
Still, it’s time for the Albany police department to put the federal stop-and-frisk ruling into practice. Citizens in Albany, after all, have the same constitutional rights as people in New York City.