A New York City judge has deemed an important part of the city’s controversial “stop and frisk” program unconstitutional. The program has long been criticized as an illegal abuse of law enforcement.

Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Sheindlin ordered New York’s police to end their policy – part of the city’s “Clean Halls” program – of stopping people outside residential apartment blocks and subjecting them to random search. “Clean Halls” exists only in New York’s generally impoverished Bronx section.

“While it may be difficult to say when precisely to draw the line between constitutional and unconstitutional police encounters such a line exists, and the NYPD has systematically crossed it when making trespass stops outside buildings,” Scheindlin’s ruling reads.

The case centered on Jaenean Ligon, a Bronx teen stopped and searched by four police officers – two of them undercover – as he left his building to buy groceries for his mother in summer 2011.

When police contacted Ligon’s mother to verify that he had a reason to be on the block, she feared he was in serious trouble or had been killed.

Ligon’s lawyers argued that his experience with “stop and frisk” is a normal one in higher-crime areas of the city.

Statistics released in 2011 showed, for example, that the number of young black men stopped as part of “Stop and Frisk” was actually greater than the total number of young black men living in the city.

And though the NYPD has claimed that the program has stopped New Yorkers from carrying guns on the city’s streets, statistics show that though the annual number of random stops has increased by nearly 525,000 since 2003, only 176 more guns have on average been found.

In short, the NYPD view is simple: If you’re black or latino, you’re a criminal. Good luck Oakland.