Study Finds No Pattern of Racial Profiling
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A long-awaited independent review of half a million reports by the New York Police Department of stop, question, and frisk encounters with civilians was hailed yesterday by police officials, who said the review found no pattern of racial profiling.
The study, by the Rand Corp. of Santa Monica, Calif., found that black pedestrians were stopped by police “at a rate that is 20 to 30% lower than their representation in crime-suspect descriptions.”
It said that oft-cited criticisms that the police stop minorities at rates greater than their presence in the population have been “widely discredited,” and “are not suitable for assessing racial bias,” because they “do not account for differential rates of crime participation by race or for differential exposure to the police.”
The report did find some officers in some areas — Queens South, Brooklyn South, and Staten Island — who seemed to be stopping minorities more than their colleagues on the police force, or using more force against minorities. “The analysis flagged 0.5% of the 2,756 NYPD officers most active in pedestrian-stop activity,” the report said.
The New York Civil Liberties Union criticized the report. “This has all the trappings of a whitewash,” the NYCLU’s executive director, Donna Lieberman, said. “No matter how much the statistics are massaged, that fact still remains that in 2006, more than half a million New Yorkers were stopped and frisked by police, about 90% of those people were engaged in no unlawful activity, and 86% of those people were black or Latino.”
The report recommended that the NYPD review the boroughs with the largest racial disparities in stop outcomes. It also said officers should clearly explain to pedestrians why they are being stopped. But it said the analysis implied that “a large-scale restructuring of NYPD SQF policies and procedures is unwarranted.”
The report was paid for by the New York City Police Foundation, a nonprofit allied with the NYPD but independent of it.