By Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN – The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a class-action lawsuit challenging an NYPD practice of adding everyone it stops and frisks to a database, even if they never commit a crime.
Police add the names and addresses of every person they question to a massive electronic database used in criminal investigations, according to the NYCLU. The names are added regardless of whether or not a person is charged with a crime.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told DNAinfo the database is "an important investigative tool" and cited nearly a dozen cases in which the records were instrumental in leading police to suspects.
But the NYCLU says the city's practice is “unconstitutional and illegal," citing a state law that requires that all police stop and frisk records remain private and sealed.
"More than 100,000 people are in this criminal suspect database even though they have been cleared of all wrongdoing and even though the law requires the NYPD to seal their records," NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn, who is serving as lead counsel on the case, said in a statement.
The NYPD has stopped and questioned people nearly 3 million times since 2004, according to the suit.
Only 10 percent of those stopped are arrested or issued summons, and more than 80 percent are Latino or black.
One of the two named plaintiffs in the case, Harlem resident Clive Lino, 29, alleges he was stopped at least 13 times by the NYPD between February 2008 and August 2009, and wants his information wiped from the records.
“What the NYPD is doing is unfair and a violation of my rights,” he was quoted on the NYCLU's Website saying. “I should not have to fear becoming the subject of an investigation without my knowledge for things that I have no involvement in."
The suit names Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and four officers as defendants.
Kate O'Brien Ahlers, media and communications director of the NYC Law Department, said it will "review the complaint thoroughly" once papers are formally served.
Kelly has defended the database in the past, saying that information collected during stop and frisks is “a tool for investigators to utilize in the subsequent location and apprehension of criminal suspects,” according to the suit.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Council Member Peter Vallone, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, have both expressed serious concern over the database in recent months.
