New York's stop-and-frisk policy was mentioned earlier in this thread. It should be noted that that policy was is currently under examination in the federal courts. A federal judge just ruled that the NYPD has used the policy both as a method of racial profiling and for stopping people without any sort of reasonable suspicion and searching without probable cause (many times, the bulge of a wallet was the basis for the stop-and-frisk). The judge stopped short of ruling that the law itself is inherently unconstitutional, but did find that the way in which the NYPD was implementing it was unconstitutional.
Suofftopicry of the opinion: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-practice-violated-rights-judge-rules.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
The complete 195-page opinion: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/12/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-decision.html
This is not relevant to Zimmerman, but is relevant to questions of race in the USA which surfaced later in the thread.
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