Burkhalter said the NYPD arrest data mirrors that of large police departments across the county and "has been another long cry of the Black community that Black Americans are more likely to be arrested generally than white Americans."
An analysis by ABC News of arrest data voluntarily reported to the FBI by thousands of city and county police departments around the country reveals that, in 800 jurisdictions, Blacks were arrested at a rate five times higher than white people in 2018, after accounting for the demographics of the cities and counties those police departments serve.
In 250 jurisdictions, Black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.
“The root of the problem is more of a socioeconomic problem than a crime problem," said Burkhalter, who retired from the NYPD in 2004 after a 20-year career.
Burkhalter noted that the bulk of the arrests that have occurred in New York City have been in the poorest communities, where educational, health and social service resources are lacking.
⁂5 million arrests in 13 years
Of the more than 5 million arrests the NYPD made between 2006, the earliest year the NYC OpenData base goes back to, and 2019, the most recent data, most were made in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in New York. Of the 10 New York City police precincts that recorded the most arrests during the 13-year span, seven were in predominantly minority, lower-income neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
"Those folks also tend to rely more on 911 because that is their only resource," Burkhalter said. "Say I’m an investment banker and I live on the Upper East Side [of Manhattan] in a really nice neighborhood. If I have an issue with my spouse or an issue with my child, their first inkling is not to call 911. They’ll involve some type of private entity, a social worker, a psychologist, a counselor, whatever the case.
“Folks who don’t have those resources, don’t have the money for those resources and may not even know those resources exist, they’re going to call 911," Burkhalter said. “But once police get there, what are we trained to do? We’re trained to look for a crime. So I’m going to show up and the first question I’m going to ask is, 'Did he or she touch you?' And if they did, that’s harassment or that’s misdemeanor assault and under state law, you have to be arrested."
Burkhalter said that numerous arrests happen on the streets in communities saturated by police officers due to high crime. He said that when he was a patrol officer, he called arrests in such communities "the low-hanging fruit of law enforcement," adding that many of the arrests were for possession and use of narcotics.
"As you look at the statistics of who was arrested for drug possession and those types of crimes … you would think that only Black folks and Hispanic folks use drugs. And that's not true," Burkhalter said.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy center working to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, said that while stop and frisk ended six years ago, that doesn’t necessarily change the allocation of law enforcement officers around the city.
"So it’s quite likely the same low-income minority communities where stop and frisk was basically taking place still might have roughly the same allocation of officers there," Mauer told ABC News. "They’re doing a variety of things, they’re just not doing stop or frisks anymore."
Mauer said that there used to be an unspoken understanding in police departments that crime in poor minority communities was less of a concern unless it spilled over into more affluent neighborhoods.
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