Study Shows Extensive Racial Profiling by New York City Police

A recent study by the Center for Constitutional Rights found that the New York City Police Department has been conducting its stop-question-and-frisk policy in a manner consistent with racial profiling.  

The study examined police data regarding the 2.8 million stop-question-and-frisk stops that were logged from 2004 through 2009.  This data includes only stops made at the discretion of an officer, not those based on radio requests. . 

Nearly 200,000 (6.7 percent) of the stops were made without proper legal justification, and 24 percent of the police reports logged in five years lacked enough information to evaluate the legality of the stop.

Dr. Jeffrey Fagan, the Columbia Law School professor who conducted the study, found that NYPD stops are significantly more frequent for Black and Hispanic citizens than for White citizens. His study also revealed that “Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be stopped than Whites even in areas where there are low crime rates and where residential populations are racially heterogeneous or predominantly White.”

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights supports an end to racial profiling based not only on its discriminatory nature but on the fact that it simply doesn’t work and wastes precious law enforcement resources.