by Deborah Sontag and Dan Barry

About the authors: Deborah Sontag and Dan Barry are staff reporters for the New York Times.

After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night in February 1997, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs.

Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep. Frustrated by the officers’ refusal to hear her explanation for being on that particular block, Ms. Harris made a tactical mistake: she wisecracked. “Oh...