Racial disparities persist even in precincts where people of color are a small minority.

Evidence

The New York Civil Liberties Union’s (NYCLU) analysis of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) stop-and-frisk rates in 2012 found that although young Black and Latino males made up only 4.7 percent of NYC’s population, they accounted for 40.6 percent of stops (NYCLU, 2013). Even in the majority of the ten precincts with the lowest representation of African American and Latino residents in the city (comprising between 8 percent and 14 percent of the population), more than 70 percent of stops were of African Americans and Latinos. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 360

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• QUESTION: The precinct-level finding, that 70% of stops target a small minority, strongly undercuts the ‘going where the crime is’ defense — worth chasing whether crime-rate data in those low-representation precincts was also tested.

Related

• Racial stop disparities hold even in precincts with few minority residents (similarity 0.97)
• Crime-rate differences cannot fully explain racial disparities in police stops. (similarity 0.83)
• Police treatment disparities span stops, abuse, force, and response speed (similarity 0.81)
• Oakland stop data shows racial disparities across most officers, not a few (similarity 0.81)
• Ambiguous police stops confirm minorities’ belief that officers are racist (similarity 0.79)