"I Am Going to Fight This!": Floyd and the Ongoing Campaign to End Racist Policing in NYC

Breakfast and lunch will be served. Please RSVP here.

In August 2013, a powerful police accountability movement secured a landmark legal victory in Floyd v. City of New York, which found that the NYPD’s widespread and systematic policy of stop-and-frisk were racially discriminatory and unconstitutional under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Through a coordinated strategy with the politically-oriented legal team, communities were able to fight the authoritarian impulses of policing in New York and to leverage this major trial to prove the obvious racism underlying the policy and demonstrate the profound harm on Black and Brown communities.  And, to win.  

The NYU Review of Law & Social Change together with the Center for Constitutional Rights are bringing together law students, lawyers, organizers, and impacted community members for a one-day symposium to reflect on the historic ruling, to discuss lessons learned in the last decade of struggle for police reform and accountability, and to imagine a future of abolition and community safety. The symposium takes its name from the words of Plaintiff David Ourlicht who, as a teen was unconstitutionally stopped three times, and who not only took the stand to fight but was inspired to go to law school and become a public defender. And we are thrilled that Judge Shira Scheindlin, who issued the landmark ruling in 2013, before being subjected to an unprecedented attack by a reactionary Second Circuit panel, will join us for a keynote conversation with Center for Constitutional Rights’ Legal Director Baher Azmy.

The symposium is an opportunity for the NYC community to discuss the ongoing movement to end racist policing in the city, offer best practices for partnerships with movement lawyers, and consider the successes and limitations of the ongoing mandated reform process. The advocates and attorneys who have accompanied decades of community organizing will discuss the ways in which the movement refined the litigation, and the litigation informed the movement. Finally, the audience will engage in a visioning process, where organizers and creatives will envision not only the next 15 years of struggle and key shifts in strategy, but support a broader articulation of community safety beyond policing.

RLSC & CCR would like to thank our Co-Sponsors: NYU's Ending the Prison Industrial Complex (EPIC), Women of Color Collective (WOCC), OUTlaw, National Lawyer's Guild (NLG), and the Disability Allied Law Students Association (DALSA).