Ruling on Stop-and-Frisk, Remembering Trayvon Martin: The New Yorker Over the past decade, the New York City Police Department has conducted roughly 4.4 million searches, overwhelmingly of black and Hispanic young men. In eighty-eight per cent of those stops, no subsequent ticket was issued. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have called the practice integral to the city's decreasing crime rates, crime has continued to fall even as stops have been curtailed. To critics, the policy amounts to officially sanctioned profiling of the city's black and brown residents - and, on Monday, Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a major ruling in a federal lawsuit challenging the program, agreed. Yet the most compelling element in Judge Scheindlin's decision that stop-and-frisk is unconstitutional - as currently practiced, at least - may have nothing to do with New York City at all. At several points in the two opinions released today, Judge Scheindlin referred to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida and its implications for policing nationwide. In prescribing, for the N.Y.P.D., a pilot program in which police will be equipped with personal cameras that record their interactions with civilians (a California police department saw a steep decline in civilian complaints after taking similar steps), Scheindlin wrote: Video recordings will serve a variety of useful functions. First, they will provide a contemporaneous, objective record of stops and frisks, allowing for the review of officer conduct by supervisors and the courts. The recordings may either confirm or refute the belief of some minorities that they have been stopped simply as a result of their race, or based on the clothes they wore, such as baggy pants or a hoodie. In case the mention of the apparel that came to symbolize the Martin case was too oblique to convey her point, she brought out the Fourth Amendment implications of racial profiling with a more specific note about how the justifications for the policy, troublingly, echoed "the stereotype that black men are more likely to engage in criminal conduct than others." She wrote, "In a recent speech responding to the public controversy surrounding the shooting of a black teenager, President Obama noted his personal experience with this stereotype." She then included a block quote from Barack Obama's comments in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict. In addition, a footnote cited a column about Martin's death by Charles Blow in the New York Times. Martin did not die at the hands of a law-enforcement officer; he did not live in New York City. Yet Judge Scheindlin's references point to the complex and contested fact that unchecked racial presumptions have consequences, sometimes disastrous ones. And, in the worst of outcomes, a policy rooted in the fear of crime can produce outcomes indistinguishable from crime itself. There is something of a feedback loop in effect here: blanket suspicion directed at one group leads to increased police contact with members of that group and ultimately increased arrests - even in instances where the arrest has nothing to do with the basis for suspicion. Thus a policy becomes self-justifying. From the outset there's been a subtheme of indignation from Mayor Bloomberg when it comes to stop-and-frisk, one with an unspoken implication that communities of color appear more offended by the police efforts to protect them than the crime that warrants the police presence in the first place. But those communities" reactions have less to do with tolerating crime than with the indignity that comes with being categorized with criminals. The N.Y.P.D. has defended stop-and-frisk as an effort to respond to what is, in fact, a greater need for police protection among the minorities who are the most common victims of crime in the city. Yet the pattern of N.Y.P.D. pedestrian stops conformed more closely to race than crime: even in low-crime, mostly white areas of the city, African-Americans and Latinos formed a disproportionate number of people stopped. That reality drives the belief that police regard people of color less as potential victims of crime than as likely vectors of it. Still, the contours of the N.Y.P.D."s justification should be deeply familiar to us by now. Between the creeping surveillance state overseen by the N.S.A., dawning awareness of civil forfeiture as a form of legalized piracy, and periodic outrages like intimate roadside searches of motorists, there's a growing sense that we've been colonized by both our collective fears and the policies that are said to protect us from them. Extreme times perhaps justify extreme measures, but there's a danger implicit within the inverse belief, and, with disturbing frequency, we seem to think of extremity as its own rationale. Terrorism exists, yet there's a false dichotomy between seeing our skyscrapers bombed into rubble and allowing the sum total of our private communication vacuumed into government servers. Scheindlin's ruling suggested that the existence of crime does not mean that citizens should choose between their safety and their dignity; it suggested that the Constitution's endurance matters. There's been a great deal of debate about whether stop-and-frisk actually reduces crime. The most salient element of the ruling today is that it wouldn't be justifiable even if it did. In addition to the wearable-camera pilot program, Scheindlin asked for the appointment of a federal monitor. There's an unspoken irony at play: N.Y.P.D. officers in precincts with the highest number of stops will also have to confront the idea that they are the ones being watched. Above: Judge Shira Scheindlin in her chambers. Photograph by Richard Drew/AP.