NYC's Blacks and Latinos Frisked 9x More Often Than Whites

by Te-Ping Chen
The New York Police Department thinks that blacks and Latinos are unusually "furtive" in their movements. Or that, anyway, is the reason NYPD police officers put forward to explain why the city's police stop and search minorities so often — in fact, fully nine times more frequently than whites in New York, according to the latest data.

After initiating any "stop and frisk" (basic anatomy: cops ask you for ID, turn you around and place you against a car, or up against a wall, tell you to spread your legs, rummage through your clothes in search of contraband), police have to explain why they decided to stop someone. Only 15% of the time is it because someone "fits a relevant description" of a suspect. Usually, it's because someone was making "furtive movements" — i.e., "that guy/woman looked sketchy to me."

Decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Terry v. Ohio that police could briefly detain someone on the street, so long as they had "reasonable suspicion" about their activities. Unfortunately, the cops' intuition on who looks suspicious happens to accord overwhelmingly with race. Though in 2009, police stopped and searched nearly 490,000 blacks and Latinos on the street in New York — compared to just 53,000 whites — arrest rates for the two groups, once stopped, were virtually the same, and in fact a bit higher among whites. For example, about 1.7% of whites who were frisked turned out to be carrying weapons, while among blacks who were stopped, that figure was 1.1%.

It's these kinds of biases that lie behind the fact that in New York City, fully 87% of people arrested on marijuana charges are black or Latino — even though both groups have similar marijuana use as whites (but then again, you won't see many cops frisking white youth on the Upper East Side).

The city has responded to these figures by arguing that because more police are sent to higher-crime areas, there's more suspicious activity around, and officers naturally end up stopping more people as a result. The department also says that the tactic has forced criminals to keep their guns shelved at home, while helping the city build a police database of thousands of names that detectives can use in the future when fighting crime. (Of course, this doesn't answer why New York thinks it will be helpful to compile — as NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn puts it — a "massive database of black and brown New Yorkers," when many of them have never been arrested or committed a crime.)

Neither does it get at the question of why police feel so much more inclined to use force when they're stopping blacks and Latinos, as opposed to whites. Though police used force in 19% of stops involving whites, when detaining blacks and Latinos, fully 26% of the time, officers decided to draw their weapons or throw someone onto the ground.