Hispanic Police Officer Joins Racial Profiling Lawsuit: $100 Million racial lawsuit is filed against Suffolk cops
A Hispanic NYPD cop is among seven minority-group members who filed a $100 million suit charging the Suffolk County Police Department with racial profiling, the Daily News has learned. Officer Angel Feliciano, an 11-year-veteran assigned to the 19th Precinct on Manhattan's upper East Side, claims in a federal lawsuit he was targeted twice in the past year while driving near his suburban home. The unidentified Suffolk County cop allegedly asked Feliciano "what he was doing in the area," according to the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court. When Feliciano, 40, identified himself as a cop, he was allowed to go after clearing a computer check of his license plates. About a month after that incident, Feliciano was sitting in his parked car in front of his home in a racially mixed neighborhood when a Suffolk County police radio car pulled alongside and the white cops asked him what he was doing. "There was no probable cause for the officers to approach him, and they only did so because he is nonwhite," the cop's lawyer K.C. Okoli charged. "He is going forward with this because he knows it is wrong and it is not an isolated incident," Okoli added. Feliciano is joined by six African-American and Hispanic plaintiffs in the class-action suit. The federal complaint alleges the Suffolk County police force engages in a continuing pattern of race-based car stops and harassments of nonwhite motorists. [more] and
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