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Crime & Safety

NYPD to Back Off On Taxi Passenger Searches

City settles suit brought by a Brooklyn radio exec who charged officers pulled him from a cab and searched him without cause.

The New York Police Department will better train officers in the ways that they may legally order livery passengers out of livery cabs and search them, says the New York Times.

Bed-Stuy resident and radio executive Terrence Battle, along with Munir Pujara, a lawyer from Harlem, filed the suit that led to this week's policy change. Battle, who is black, and Pujara, who is of South Asian descent, alleged they had been pulled out of cabs by police officers without justification.

First instituted in 2009, the Taxi/Livery Robbery Inspection Program—TRIP—allows drivers who display a window decal to be stopped by the police in order to check on their safety.

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However, according to the suit, officers were using the decal as license to remove and search passengers.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told the Times that the department would "continue to inform and train uniformed members as to when it is appropriate under the law to remove passengers from liveries during TRIP stops."

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A spokesperson for the New York Civil Liberties Union said that the NYPD "recognized that this was a department-wide problem that had to be fixed."

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