Not surprisingly, it depends whom you ask.
鈥淚t鈥檚 almost like asking 鈥榠s the Pope Catholic?鈥� 鈥� says Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project at the Urban Justice Center. 鈥淥f course it鈥檚 racist. Eighty percent of people stopped are black or brown.鈥�
Mr. Gangi says the practice 鈥渢argets everybody of a certain color, certain age cohort who live in certain communities, basically low-income black and brown young men.鈥�
Black and Hispanic men between 14 and 24 make up 4.7 percent of the city鈥檚 population, but comprise 41.6 percent of all people stopped and frisked, evidence that the program is racially biased, according to Gangi.
Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of 鈥淎re Cops Racist,鈥� says stops and arrests should be compared against crime data, not population data.
Blacks commit two-thirds of violent crimes in New York, 70 percent of robberies, and 80 percent of shootings, with blacks and Hispanics together committing 98 percent of shootings in New York, according to NYPD data, says Ms. Mac Donald. Those figures, she says, explain why stops are targeted toward those communities.
鈥淪hootings produce police activity,鈥� she says. 鈥淪hootings are bringing police to an area, not the race of the people who live there.鈥�
As such, Mac Donald says, stop and frisk targets crime, not race. 鈥淭he NYPD focuses resources on where citizens need them most, they happen to be minorities.鈥�
