NYPD, it turns out, is not color blind. Sunday’s New York Daily News I-Team has wonderfully researched, well written article by Tina Moore, Benjamin Lesser and Greg B. Smith [1] in which they show (definitively, in my opinion) that NYPD’s practice of Stop & Frisk on NYC subways is aimed at Hispanics and Blacks and unrelated to law enforcement purposes.
Because NYPD practices here are so outrageous, Mayor Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner must be held accountable for their vastly disproportionate racial impacts. As you may recall, NYPD has made every effort to hide the racial data generated by their stop and frisk program. Some of it has leaked out, (See, my earlier report with links here [2] if you want further background).
In Sunday’s News, (check out the AP report here [2]), the I-Team, which should be nominated for prizes for this story, writes:
â€The NYPD is far more likely to stop and question black and Latino subway riders than white commuters - particularly in Manhattan, a Daily News investigation has found.
Blacks and Hispanics make up 49% of subway riders, yet account for nearly 90% of the citizens stopped and questioned in the subways in the last two years.
Whites make up 35.5% of subway ridership, yet they account for a mere 7.9% of the subway riders stopped in the last two years, records show.
This racial disparity occurs across the city, particularly in NYPD Transit Districts that serve mostly white neighborhoods of Manhattan, including Wall Street, SoHo, Tribeca, the West Village, the upper West and East Sides, and midtown.â€
Make sure, when you read the story to look carefully at the accompanying graphs. Yes, yes, graphs are mostly for boring school children -- but do not miss these. In particular, one bar graph shows that it was only after subway crime bottomed out that NYPD began it’s race-based program of stopping Hispanic and Black people and frisking them..
For an interesting riff on the Daily News I-Team report try this from Racism Review [3]
As I see it, in and of itself, this stop and frisk program is not apartheid, but it uses, as a weapon of racial control, a tool of apartheid. Only when middle-aged, well suited Jews and Irish people are stopped and frisked at rates comparable to their proportion in the population, should be allow Mayor Bloomberg or Commissioner Kelly to say anything except “I apologize†for this remarkably shameful and unjust misuse of police power.
I suggest you read the related stories too: Tina Moore's account of how the stops feel to New Yorkers of color here [4] and here [5] Great reporting! They also have posted a good interactive map with stop & frisks by subway station here, [6] if you want to calculate your chances of a humiliating encounter with New York's somewhat less than finest.
Of course evidence of direct racial profiling in stop & frisk cases [7] is sparse. As a result, some (incorrectly, as I read the data) attribute the intense racial disparity in stop & frisks to a claim that minorities are asserted to be crime suspects more often (NYPD claims this) or that minorities commit more crimes [8]. For a thoughtful, well-researched but somewhat dated (2002) rebuttal of the conservative-Manhattan-Institute approach to law enforcement as behavior modification, try Bruce Harcourt's Policing Disorder [9] in the Boston Review.
If NYPD directs its enforcement effort at one portion of the population, that portion will be arrested and convicted more than others. Marijuana arrests, for example, are overwhelmingly of people of color in NYC -- but marijuana use is not so confined. One group is on the receiving end of more enforcement than is the other.
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