New Arrest Data Under de Blasio's First 6 Months Reveal a Racial Police Bias Similar to Bloomberg

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/new-arrest-data-under-de-blasios-first-6-months-reveal-racial-police-bias-similar-bloomberg



In the first six months of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration, the New York Police Department made 117,336 misdemeanor arrests. More than 86 percent of those involved people of color charged with resisting arrest, petty theft, criminal possession of marijuana and other charges that fall under the "broken windows" policy.

In 2013, 117,104 misdemeanor arrests were made under Mike Bloomberg's administration, 87 percent of which included people of color. The figures between the two administrations are strikingly similar.

The numbers, released by the Police Reform Organizing Project, are a wakeup call for de Blasio, whose campaign sharply criticized Bloomberg and former NYPD Commissioner Bill Kelly's policing policies. The recent death of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by an NYPD officer after being arrested for allegedly selling cigarettes, has also put intense heat on the mayor.

That said, it's too soon to call de Blasio's police policy a failure. Any police system in America takes time to reform and is an almost Mission Impossible undertaking. And even if aggressive efforts are made to train officers in the area of community relations, it would take time to get the NYPD's 34,500 officers on the same page. The mayor has a big mess to clean up.

As AlterNet previously reported, the New York Daily News released data that revealed disturbing racial bias in how broken windows has been enforced over the past 10 years. Here are more details from that report:

In a first-ever breakdown of released summons statistics, the Daily News found that writing summonses is the most frequent activity conducted by the New York Police Department, surpassing felony and misdemeanor arrests combined. Since the "broken windows" policy—which means zero tolerance for small infractions—was implemented during early the 1990s, the number of summonses has increased exponentially. In 1993, 160,000 summonses were issues; in 2005, that number climbed to a peak of 648,638.

[LuvNewcastle]

1. He has the same police force that Bloomberg had, so it's going to take some time

for him to get them to switch gears. de Blasio can change some things quickly, but changing the tactics that the city's police use in dealing with the public isn't one of those things. I don't understand why they're still doing Stop and Frisk, though. I thought they would have stopped that by now. I don't like Zero Tolerance policies, either, especially over petty crimes.

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. Bratton is a hard core racist

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. I was reflexively getting ready to throw the, "maybe he's just finding out" card but

since de Blasio campaigned on the issue I guess that won't hold.

Procrastination? Lethargy?

[iandhr]

4. I am a New Yorker who never drank the deBlasio

Kool Aid. I also think it is unreasonable to suspect such a systemic shift since the police have been trained to a very very long timery very long time. this type of change will take years not a few months.