“I have not had anyone come and tell me, ‘I was stopped because I was a person of color,’ ” Mr. Esposito recently testified in the continuing stop-and-frisk trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
This seemed to catch the judge by surprise, especially when Mr. Esposito went one step further: no local community group or tenant association had ever made a racial profiling allegation to him.
“Not a single stop?” Judge Shira A. Scheindlin asked. “Our kids are being stopped. You’ve never heard that from any community group?”
But over the course of the trial, which began in March, that claim has been repeated by other police commanders, leading city lawyers to suggest that racial profiling is largely a fiction created by the civil rights lawyers who brought the case.
