"There are other just as nefarious, just as racially-biased practices that have filled the void. Unless you're really going to start at the roots of the problem, you’re going to end up in the same place," said Ann Mathews, managing director of the criminal defense practice for The Bronx Defenders, a city public defenders office. "We may be seeing lower arrest numbers, but the way those arrests are happening, who’s being arrested, how they are being arrested, how the police are targeting for arrests, that’s really unchanged. There has not been a sea change in the way the NYPD approaches policing."
At the height of stop-and-frisk in New York City in 2011, police made 412,859 arrests. Blacks accounted for 202,284 of those suspects arrested, or 49%, while 139,363 Hispanics were arrested, or 34%, and the 50,925 white suspects accounted for 12% of the arrests. The most arrests in that year, 103,835, were for dangerous drugs, followed by 36,112 for misdemeanor assault.
Since 2011, the number of arrests in New York City has fallen annually from 396,280 in 2012 to 214,617 in 2019. But the racial breakdown on arrestees remains consistent, the data shows.
In 2019, Blacks, while comprising 24% of the total New York City population of more than 8.3 million, still accounted for 48% of those arrested. Meanwhile, whites, who make up 43% of the population, accounted for 11% of the arrests; Hispanics, who account for 29% of the population, made up 34% of the arrests; and Asians, who account for 14% of the population, comprised 6% of the arrests, according to the data.
Data from 2020, shows that as of March 31 the NYPD had made 44,824 arrests. Of those arrested, 49% were Black, 32% were Hispanic and 11% were white.
Asked by ABC News about the apparent disparities in its arrest data, the NYPD denied that its anti-crime policies are targeting Blacks and Hispanics.
"The NYPD enforces the law fairly and equally and works tirelessly every day to keep every resident and every neighborhood safe," Sgt. Mary Frances O'Donnell, an NYPD spokesperson, said in a statement to ABC News. "The NYPD is committed to ongoing criminal justice reform that balances public safety, investigations and the ability to bring justice for New Yorkers who are victimized."
John DeCarlo, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven's Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, told ABC News that while he does not believe police target people for arrest based on race, he said officers often find themselves enforcing "overreaching laws" passed by legislatures that end up being biased against residents of economically disadvantaged communities.
"In many of the poorer communities, there's a higher minority representation. So what happens is cops come in contact with minority communities that really need not necessarily police services but other kinds of services. They need counselors, they need ways to solve problems that we all have but they don't have the wherewithal to use because of economic restrictions," DeCarlo, the former police chief of Branford, Connecticut, told ABC News.
He noted that Eric Garner "lost his life basically because of an overreaching law." Garner, a 43-year-old Black man, died in July 2014 when an NYPD officer placed him in a banned chokehold after plainclothes police attempted to arrest him for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes.
“I’m not being an apologist for bad policing in any way, but I think that we make laws very often and we ask cops to enforce laws that may be biased toward economic status," DeCarlo said.
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