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 [1] under contract with an NYPD-entity ( The NYC Police Foundation [2].) 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. In many of those cases, NYPD requires its officers to fill out a form – UF250. While the forms themselves, and much of the data generated from them has not been released by NYPD, 2006 raw data was. In 2006, officers filled out UF250 indicating 508,540 intrusive stops, frisks & searches. [3]. Of those, 53% black, 29% were Hispanic, 11% whites. Since blacks made up 23.7% of the 2006 population, they were stopped at more than twice the rate of their proportion. Whites (35%, in 2006) were stopped less than one-third of their proportion, while the rate of Hispanic stops was roughly equal to their proportion in the NYC 2006 population. (2006 NYC pop. date lifted from Andrew Beveridge’s Gotham Gazette post on Demographic Changes in NYC [4])

Thus, Stop & Frisk tactics of the NYPD amount, in my view, to a procedure for asserting control NYC's black population. Every year, it appears literally hundreds of thousands of blacks are stopped by the police, frisked and searched in a net so wide that it casts a shadow on the lives of all New Yorkers. These police activities are so focused on blacks as to call to mind the pass-law stops of white South African police in the decades of Apartheid. (The NY Times reported more than somewhat lower numbers in the first quarter of 2007 [5]).

Meaghan Tady in a wonderful survey of stop and frisk issues [6] last month, in the Gotham Gazette, quoted NAACP NYC Director Ken Cohen as

“advising blacks stopped to follow directions and remain nonconfrontational, even if it means disregarding their right to ask for the officer's name or badge number.
"We've found that when you do ask, that only infuriates the officers and makes things worse," said Cohen. "Things can get quickly out of control if [officers] feel like they're not in control or if you're asking too many questions."

.

In the face of these appalling race-based practices, Mayor Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner did a fast shuffle of the figures. First, they said that blacks were stopped no more frequently than black suspects were identified as crime suspects. Then they hired an outside consultant, the RAND Corporation [7] to check it out. Or did they? They hired the RAND Corporation all right but lo! And behold! When RAND’s report came back, it used the NYPD’s rationale and concluded NYPD was not racially biased in its Stop & Frisk policies. NY Times coverage here [8] and here [9]. The report itself – 80 pages or so – pdf file is here. [10]

Part of the trouble with the Rand report is that it is based on data NYPD has failed and refused to make public in a usable form (notwithstanding local law and a court order which, as I read them, require this data to be released). Part of the trouble is that they appear to pluck from thin air their methods of analyzing the data that the rest of us cant see. If you can stand it, try reading the report.

Understandably, New York Civil Liberties [11] lawyers Donna Lieberman and Chris Dunn are less than pleased with the Rand report [12]. They suggest it reeks of whitewash.. They said:

“This report does nothing to change the number of law-abiding New Yorkers who were stopped or frisked by the police last year,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “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 percent of those people were engaged in no unlawful activity, and 86 percent of those people were black or Latino.”
The 80 page report appears to distort the data, and often attempts to justify negative outcomes based on hypothesis and conjecture.
“It’s clear by their own language that the report’s authors are trying to explain away the racial disparities that arise over and over again,” Lieberman said. “This has all the trappings of a whitewash.”
Just one example of this is the report’s conclusion on page 40 that force was more likely to be used against black suspects than against other racial groups. It then attempts to muddy this conclusion by questioning whether black suspects are more likely to attempt to resist or flee without presenting a shred of data to support that idea.

The Center for Constitutional Rights [13] also condemned the Rand report [14], as did a national Latino police officers association [15]. The degree to which NYPD has circled the wagons on this is revealed in the sneering reaction of NYPD D/C Paul Brown. These guys are in denial.

Gothamist had a round-up of Rand reactions [16] a few days ago.

Is there a way, I wonder, to persuade Mayor Bloomberg to cease data fudging in areas such as this and to try facing the reality the rest of us live with?

Background: Some this is fairly technical, but little of it is written in lawyer.

Some of the issues of the disparate racial impact of NYPD stop & frisk tactics rose to the boiling point toward the end of the Giuliani Mayoralty. Then Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, reported the adverse black-latino impacts in a 1999 review of 175,000 stop & frisk records [17].

In 2000, the US Commission of Civil Rights had hearings and wrote an important report on NYPD's operations. The Stop & Frisk chapter [18] contains a good, detailed, review of law and NYPD practice. (This chapter, slightly dated, is for those truly committed to knowing the field fully.)

The researchers who worked with Spitzer then published their findings in a 2005, somewhat technical but useful, analysis [19].

Did you want to read a (somewhat nutty, in my opinion) right-wing tirade on the subject? Heather MacDonald, writing in City Journal says that those concerned about innocent blacks stopped and frisked should reduce the number of black criminals [20]

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