EDIT: Brief summary for all those new to the blog since this post is generating quite a bit of external traffic. I was stopped in the middle of 2011 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on my way home after visiting a friend of mine who lived there, by 4 NYPD officers in an unmarked car. They detained me, threatened me with arrest, and searched me because I didn’t want to talk to them, which is, of course, my right. I sued the city, who has mysteriously been “unable” to find these officers and now suggests that they probably don’t even exist. In light of the fact that the NYPD stops and frisks 700,000 people on NYC streets annually, that does not seem to be the likely explanation. My background is that I am a tech entrepreneur, musician, and civil rights advocate, and you may be familiar with my work on the latter via my “How to Get ANYTHING Through TSA Nude Body Scanners” viral video published this March.

In documents filed today in my lawsuit against the NYPD for stopping and frisking me on the street because I was a white boy in a black neighborhood (which naturally means I’m a drug dealer), NYPD attorney Vicki Zgodny (on whom the City wastes $65K/year to make such [losing] arguments as “a unicycle is a bicycle“) whines that “Plaintiff has garnered media attention from other lawsuits he has brought, including a lawsuit against Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in which plaintiff maintains a blog, and has threatened to focus the same media attention on the instant lawsuit if the City does not settle the case.” They continue that I “have an agenda to criticize the NYPD and any government agency that he is displeased with just as he did with the Transportation Security Administration.”

I’m “displeased” when you ban sodas larger than 16 ounces, when you have the largest police force in the world but your response time to 911 calls averages 9 minutes, and when you decide you know better than both doctors and the law (repeatedly) regarding what women should and should not do with their breasts. But I file suit when you infringe on my personal, constitutionally-guaranteed liberties, demand “papers, please!” as I walk down the street, and put your hands on my body with neither my consent nor reasonable suspicion. I suspect you’d do the same, Vicki, if a bunch of NYPD thugs felt you up as you walked down the street.

So, you’re damn right that the NYPD is in the same boat as the TSA. Both of you violate the citizens on a daily basis in the name of “keeping us safer,” both of you have a habit of lying, covering up, and trying to use legal nuances such as immunity and jurisdiction defenses to keep your actions away from a jury, and both of you are right to fear that I will expose your unlawful and uncivilized behavior to the public in a major way, such as I did for the TSA last March.

Relevant Docs:

Corbett v. NYPD – Summary Judgment 56.1 Statement

Corbett v. NYPD – Summary Judgment Reply