...The NYPD anti-gang initiative also came as a class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights challenged the department’s use of stop-and-frisk. In 2013, a federal judge determined that the NYPD was liable for a pattern and practice of racial profiling and unconstitutional stops. In her law review article, Howell wrote that Operation Crew Cut continued NYPD practices of profile-based policing. The lawsuit challenging stop-and-frisk, she wrote, “threatened to foreclose NYPD’s ability to monitor youth of color in the absence of crime based on appearance and geography. … For the NYPD to relinquish the intensive policing of these suspect populations is unthinkable.” ...

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