In a city in which it is not a crime to shoot Sean Bell fifty times or Amadou Diallo 41 times, where black and Hispanic young men are stopped and frisked vastly in excess of their proportion of the population, it should not be a surprise that blacks & Hispanics are arrested for marijuana possession vastly more than whites (even though marijuana use is equal across ethnic groups). The surprise, as I see it, is that decent people don’t spit at Mayor Bloomberg and his police Commissioner. How often will NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Misinformation, Paul Browne, say things like the NYPD doesn’t engage in racial profiling without his nose growing from Police Plaza to City Hall? (I hate it when Mayor Bloomberg’s race policies make me write as though I were Al Sharpton.)

Rocco Parascandola of Newsday reports on a study released by the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade -- a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges NYCLU,

The NYCLU press release, is here

The subject of this post is simple and incredibly complex at the same time. Is it the standard practice of NYPD to stop, frisk and/or search blacks in NYC much more frequently than they do whites? The simple answer is yes. The complex answer is no. The complex answer was produced by the Rand Corporation under contract with an NYPD-entity ( The NYC Police Foundation.) Do you believe the Rand Corporation? I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you.
(Some background materials with links have been added long after the jump)

NYPD officers stop New Yorkers all the time; we’re pulled over for broken tail lights, for riding a bike without a bell, as we stand on the street. How those police stops break out racially is not the subject of this post – even though I personally suspect that were those stops ever studied, there might well be a disparate racial impact noted.

However, sometimes the way in which Police stop New Yorkers is more intrusive than others.