The glowing praise of the racist "Stop and Frisk" policy by the NYPD and city officials and the fuzzy math statistics that claim vastly reduced crime weren't enough to stop a federal judge today from granting class-action status in a lawsuit against the NYPD that claims the practice violates the constitutional rights of blacks and Hispanics.

Maybe it was the Jateik Reed video or the facts that revealed, among other things, that more young black men were stopped and frisked by police last year than actually live in the city, according to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The New York Times obtained Judge Shira Scheindlin's opinion, which stated that the evidence presented showed that the central tenets that make up the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy led to many illegal stops. Judge Scheindlin writes:

It is rather audacious of the NYPD to argue that if it were possible to protect "the right of people to be secure in their persons" from unlawful searches and seizures by the NYPD, then the legislature would already have done so and judicial intervention would therefore be futile. Indeed, it is precisely when the political branches violate the individual rights of minorities that "more searching judicial enquiry" is appropriate.

(Emphasis is Judge Scheindlin's.) The NYPD is on track to break last year's record of 601,055 stops (that's 1,900 a day) in 2012.