The Police Department's request to scuttle much of the agreement, made in a motion to the court last month, would permit officers to gather intelligence without evidence of criminal activity, a dangerous authority that even the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not have, the lawyers contended.
The Act also permit officers to detain passengers - whether suspicious or not - at ports and airports for up to six hours, as well as take fingerprints and DNA samples.
"Then finally, one day, I heard that the Atlanta wetlands-permit officer was no longer in the job".
Probable cause, a higher legal standard than reasonable suspicion, permits officers to make arrests on evidence supporting a 50 percent or less chance of wrongdoing, many scholars believe.
The work by the Center for Constitutional Rights is the latest in a series of examinations of the police tactic defined by a Supreme Court decision from decades ago, Terry v. Ohio, which permitted officers to detain someone briefly based on "reasonable suspicion," a threshold lower than the probable cause necessary for a formal arrest.
The NYPD has a policy called Operations Order 44, which permits officers to shred department directives such as roll calls, bureau chief memos, police officer monthly performance reports, and command discipline logs.
While the CPD permits officers to use Tasers on suspects as young as 7 years old, apprehending a shoplifter is not an approved use, no matter how old they may be.
Following a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1968 permitting officers to conduct stop and frisk searches if they have reasonable suspicion that a person has or is about to break the law, officers in New York and around the country have carried out the same or similar-type searches.
Faced with a credible allegation of serious misconduct, senior officers might be forgiven for taking the view that the only pragmatic solution is to permit the officer's retirement or resignation.
