New York's Legal Battle Over Stop and Frisk Comes to an End

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio may have lost ground with stop-and-frisk opponents by tapping veteran lawman Bill Bratton to head the NYPD, but a decision he made today should restore his standing. Earlier this afternoon, de Blasio announced that the city will drop its appeal of last year's landmark stop-and-frisk ruling, and settle with the plaintiffs.

The decision won't bring an end to stop and frisk, the use of which has been slowly declining since 2011, but it does signal an end of another saga—the one that began when Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled in August 2013 that the practice, as deployed by the NYPD, was unconstitutional.