New York's Mayor Bill de Blasio reached an agreement to end the battle over stop-and-frisk. 

The new mayor announced Thursday, Jan. 30 that New York City had reached a settlement with civil rights leaders who challenged the department's controversial tactic. Originally, a federal monitoring was put in place to oversee NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk indefinitely. As a result of the agreement, the monitoring will end after three years.

Before the settlement, the Bloomberg administration appealed the judge's ruling which called the policy "unconstitutional" and resorted to indirect racial profiling. De Blasio, who took office in the beginning of the year, is now dropping the appeal. 

The Judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal Court in Manhattan,  said the practice "disproportionately stopped blacks and Latinos and violates the Equal Protection Clause," according to NY Times. Under Equal Protection, laws of a state must treat an individual in the same manner as others in similar conditions and circumstances. 

In an unusual step from the federal appeals court, Scheindlin was removed from the case according to the Huffington Post, the judge said she had spoken inappropriately in public about the case. "The stop-and-frisk tactic itself was not ruled unconstitutional but the way the department was using it violated civil rights." she said. 

According to a report, NYPD stopped 532,911 New Yorkers in 2012. The highest concentration of those stopped were blacks and Latinos. Police stopped 55 percent of blacks and 29 percent of Latinos in comparison to only 11 percent of whites.