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Stop and Frisk Policing Considered Despite Federal Court Ruling It Unconstitutional
In the years after the September 11 attacks, New York City became the epicenter of one of the most controversial policing practices in modern U.S. history: stop-and-frisk. Under the policy, police stopped millions of people on the street, questioning and searching them without warrants. The overwhelming majority of those stopped were Black and Latino New Yorkers, and most were never charged with any crime.
After years of litigation and community organizing, a federal court in 2013 ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program was unconstitutional and ordered sweeping reforms. The decision marked one of the most significant victories for police accountability in the country and led to a sharp decline in stops. Now, more than a decade later, the city’s new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, has signaled a renewed emphasis on aggressive street policing.
Guest – Jonathan Moore is a civil rights attorney and a partner at the law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman and one of New York’s leading litigators challenging unconstitutional policing. Jonathan served as co-lead trial counsel in Floyd v. City of New York, the landmark stop-and-frisk case. He has also represented four of the five men wrongfully convicted, and then exonerated, in the Central Park jogger attack, helping expose one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in modern New York history.
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The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom
Today, anyone who cares about freedom of expression needs to face a stark truth: the right to speak freely is under siege. Once celebrated as a cornerstone of democratic societies, free expression is now met with growing suspicion and retaliation across the globe. Over the last century, speech rights expanded dramatically?including postwar democratic revolutions and the sweeping protections of the First Amendment in the United States?only to find those rights unraveling in the face of new political, technological, and cultural pressures in the US and around the world.
Today, liberal democracies are imposing speech controls, authoritarian regimes are cloaking censorship in democratic language, and digital platforms wield unprecedented power over global discourse. There is a concerted backlash against free speech from all sides: governments criminalizing dissent in the name of national security; lawmakers and activists demanding tighter controls on misinformation, hate speech, and offensive content; and AI systems removing speech at a scale and speed that dwarfs historical forms of censorship. At the same time, faith in free speech itself is waning, even in the very societies that once championed it.
In their new book which will be published next month, The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom, Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff present a panoramic view of how we arrived at this pivotal moment and how free speech can meet modern challenges without abandoning its foundational role in sustaining democracy, human rights, and shared understanding.
Guest – Jacob Mchangama, is one of the co-authors of The Future of Free Speech, founder and Executive Director of the non-profit organization, The Future of Free Speech. He is a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia’s Global Freedom of Expression Center. Jacob has commented extensively on free speech and human rights in outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. Jacob has published in academic and peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, Policy Review, and Amnesty International’s Strategic Studies. He is the producer and narrator of the podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, published by Basic Books in 2022, which I had the pleasure of reviewing – quite favorably I might add – for Los Angeles Review of Books.
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