At the end of 2014, in a protest against then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, NYPD officers initiated a work slowdown that lasted about three weeks. An online magazine article about the action quoted a momentarily pleased young Black man: “Now I know what it must feel like to be a white person living in New York City.” He was commenting on his new found experience of cops not regularly targeting or harassing him for one reason, often bogus, or another.
Alas, for this young man and his fellow New Yorkers of color, especially for New Yorkers living in low income neighborhoods, their time of relaxing in the Big Apple was short lived. Relevant and reliable numbers reveal that under and throughout de Blasio’s two mayoral terms the NYPD resumed its aggressive, starkly biased tactics. To the surprise of no one, police practices during the single term of de Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, not just persisted in targeting New Yorkers of color, but expanded their discriminatory impact.
Sources for the aforementioned “relevant and reliable” numbers are undeniable. The Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), a New York State agency, for example, collects arrest statistics for every local police department in our state including the NYPD which performs the informative service of breaking down its arrest data by race. For instance, you can find not only the total number of petty larceny arrests, the second most common arrest in our city, but also the numbers for the white, Black, Latino, and Asian New Yorkers arrested on that charge in a given year.
So what numbers has DCJS reported over the years? The majority of arrests in New York City are for misdemeanors, and every year 87.5 to 88.5% of those arrests involve New Yorkers of color. For some arrests, such as for fare evasion and driving with a suspended license, the percentage of New Yorkers of color reaches well more than 90%. Each year more than 50% of felony arrests involve Black New Yorkers even though Black New Yorkers now make up less than 25% of our city’s population.
As one Black man who the NYPD had arrested for suspended license told me: “They are profiling us.”
In addition, there are the findings of the Police Reform Organizing Project’s (PROP) Court Monitoring Project, a kind of misnomer since its work actually involves assessing NYPD arrest practices. Everyone the police arrest in New York City gets arraigned shortly thereafter in the criminal courts operating in the city’s five boroughs.
Since 2014 PROP representatives have observed more than 12,000 arraignments focused on recording the race and charges for each defendant. Our findings during de Blasio’s years was that roughly 89% of NYPD arrests involved New Yorkers of color. During Adams’ term, it was approximately 91%. During Mayor Mamdani’s first six months in office we observed 875 arraignments, more than 92% involving people of color.
These numbers represent the disappointing reality that our progressive, socialist mayor has chosen to stand silently on the sidelines regarding NYPD practices. Meanwhile, the police commissioner, first appointed by Adams, Jessica Tisch, who shares the former mayor’s values and views, operates as head coach calling all the plays. She has continued, for example, quality of life enforcement strategies, also known as “broken windows” policing, infamous for arresting residents of inner city communities of color for minor offenses that have been virtually decriminalized in mainly white neighborhoods.
Another instance of Tisch’s Adams-like approach to her job involves the department’s gang database. During his campaign, Mamdani talked about abolishing the database which has been widely criticized as advancing racial discrimination, with 98% of the people listed in the document are New Yorkers of color, contributing to the high arrest rates of Black and Latino men. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has reported that Mamdani has backpedaled from his commitment to eliminate it and has allowed Tisch to take the lead on the issue.
So the stark racial bias of NYPD arrest practices persists. For the poor New Yorkers of color targeted, the hardship involves not just the arrest and what may be a short-lived loss of liberty, it’s the other outcomes that result. Eli Northrup, a public defender for years, who’s now the Democrats’ nominee to represent Manhattan’s West Side in the state Assembly, described the devastating collateral consequences in an interview with an online news source: “I mean, people had their children taken away. People lost their jobs. People lost their housing. I had clients deported.”
In a well-publicized event, on July 15, Mamdani visited Rikers Island to join men incarcerated there in watching a World Cup soccer game. “They, too, are part of NYC,” the mayor said “and they will be New Yorkers when they get out of Rikers. I wanted to make sure that we could celebrate this moment together.”
I wonder whether they, or he, fully grasp his responsibility for their being locked up in the well-documented inhumane conditions of Rikers — after all, people are confined there for two reasons: they are too poor to afford bail and a NYPD officer has arrested them.
We at PROP believe that, as indicated by his public comments made before his mayoral campaign, Mamdani knows that the NYPD’s aggressive, racially biased practices harm people, marginalized and powerless, every day. One hard-hitting statement in 2020 read: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. What we need to do is to #DefundTheNYPD.”
Perhaps there’ll come a day when he acknowledges that free and faster buses and even freezing rents, while good things, will not on their own, produce a truly just, safe, and inclusive city. He needs to act decisively to direct Tisch and the NYPD to make fundamental changes in policing and law enforcement to achieve that worthy goal — changes such as ending “broken windows” tactics and the department’s quota system that, in practice, puts pressure officers to make needless arrests. And then maybe all young men of color can relish the shared experience of white people living in our great city.
Gangi is director of the Police Reform Organizing Project.