‘It’s not illegal for me to grab you’: video of Philly cops’ stop and frisk

Two Philadelphia cops conducted an aggressive stop-and-frisk, and someone caught it on tape.

“It’s not illegal for me to grab you,” said Officer Philip Nace in the 16-minute video, full of Nace yelling obscenities at the two men he stopped. At one point, Nace says: “Don’t come to f—ing Philadelphia. Stay in Jersey.” Internal Affairs is investigating Nace, the Daily News reported.

Watch the video below. Read more about it the Daily News.

Philadelphia’s stop-and-frisk policy was the subject of a 2010 class action lawsuit that accused the city of racial profiling. As part of the settlement, the city agreed to create an electronic database where it would store data about every pedestrian stop the police made. This data would then be shared with the American Civil Liberties Union and civil-rights law firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, who would analyze the “quality and legality of the stops,” said David Rudovsky of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg.

In the most recent report on the data, the two groups reported that in the first half of 2012, out of 215,000 stops, 45 percent were made without reasonable suspicion. The Police Department refutes the report, saying that the data did not accurately capture the quality of the stops, the Daily News reported.

The stop-and-frisk electronic database is currently being overhauled, Rudovsky said, because the city, the ACLU and Rudovsky’s firm agreed it needed improvements. It’s not clear if this new database, expected to be live 2014, will more accurately capture the quality of stops. The Police Department declined to comment on the database because it’s in the process of being upgraded.

For more, read this Daily News story about a former cop who was recently stopped and frisked and called it “demeaning” and “ridiculous.”