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At some point over the next few weeks, the New York City Police Department is likely to lose a civil trial accusing it of having repeatedly violated the civil rights of city residents — and on a massive scale — by conducting hundreds of thousands of "stop and frisks." The NYPD will probably blame the judge, mostly because it can't blame the numbers.

On Monday, district court judge Shira Scheindlin heard summary arguments in the civil class action suit, Floyd, et. al. vs. City of New York. The "Floyd" in the title refers to David Floyd, who was stopped by NYPD officers in February 2008 as he was helping a neighbor who'd been locked out of the building. During the trial, Floyd described the stop — the second time it happened to him.

"It was again the humiliation," Floyd said. But this time, he added, "it wasn't down the block, it wasn't in another neighborhood. It was on the property that I lived on." "I felt that I was being told I shouldn't leave my home," he said.

That stop was one of the 540,000 times that year that the police performed a stop-and-frisk procedure. It was one of the 444,000 times that year that the person being frisked was black or Latino. It was one of the 474,000 times that year that the person being frisked was not arrested for having committed a crime. For the next three years, those figures would grow.