"Implicitly, the message is, make as many stops as possible, and hopefully you'll find something," said David Rudovsky, one of the lawyers suing the city and the Police Department.
The suit was filed by Rudovsky's firm and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
Among the eight named plaintiffs is Mahari Bailey, a Central High School and Georgetown Law graduate who has been stopped four times since 2008 in West Philadelphia "without probable cause or reasonable suspicion," according to the suit.
"It's hard when you try to do everything right and end up being treated like a criminal," said Bailey, who is African American and a lawyer in Philadelphia. "I just became a father, and don't want my children to be brought up and have to deal with this kind of mistreatment."
Nutter and his police commissioner, Charles H. Ramsey, embraced the stop-and-frisk approach in 2008 in response to a rising tide of gun violence and crime. Violent crime has dropped significantly since.
Both men have attributed the decline in part to the strategy of stop-and-frisk, which was intended to cut the number of illegal guns carried on the street.
Mark McDonald, a spokesman for Nutter, noted that police-abuse complaints have remained flat over the last several years while the number of pedestrian stops have more than doubled. That suggests that officers are following the law on permissible stop-and-frisks, he said.
A 40-year-old U.S. Supreme Court case, Terry v. Ohio, established that a police officer may legally stop and frisk a pedestrian as long as there is a "reasonable suspicion" of illegal activity. A more thorough search requires a higher threshold.
