“For a very long time, the problem of policing in minority communities was not over-policing but under-policing. People in every Black neighborhood in New York and every other city would call the police and be very frustrated that they got very little response, whether it was domestic violence, or shoplifting, or anything else," Mauer said. "Now there’s often a very heavy presence of police, but that heavy presence has contributed to these enormous racial disparities that we see in the justice system and that goes above and beyond any increase involving crime in those communities."
⁂'Good news, bad news'
Mauer said besides having a detrimental impact on the employment and education opportunities of young minority people who get caught up in the justice system, the disproportionate arrests of Black and Hispanic people breed mistrust of the police.
"Police can’t promote public safety on their own. It only works if they have a strong relationship with the community," Mauer said. "Most crimes aren’t committed with a police officer observing them in action. So if you want to get information that a crime has happened, identification of the alleged perpetrators, you have to have people who have confidence in the police that they will respond, that they will do it in a fair way and that they demonstrate concern for public safety."
He said the NYPD and other large law enforcement agencies across the country have taken steps over the past two decades to rebuild trust in neighborhoods of color by hiring and promoting more minority officers and emphasizing community policing. A big initiative of Mayor de Blasio, community policing is a strategy that focuses on building ties and working closely with members of the communities.
"We see much greater diversity on the force and in leadership as well in police agencies," he said.
Mauer said that overall he views the NYPD arrest data as “a good news-bad news situation."
"The bad news is apparently the Black proportion of arrests has hardly budged at all," he said. "While the good news is that if arrests are down by roughly half in New York, then that means that only half as many African Americans are being arrested as well as for other racial groups, too."
But Ann Mathews of The Bronx Defenders said that while she welcomes police reform efforts, "what is clear is what they haven't brought to date is unbiased policing.”
Mathews said piecemeal changes police have instituted usually when there is a crisis or when political pressure forces revisions are akin to "a Band-Aid approach" that doesn't begin to address the cancer of systemic racism.
“If the whole body is ailing you can stick as many Band-Aids on it as you want and they may do some good," she said, "but they’re not going to cure the whole body."
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