Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, the New York Times reports, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested — which, if you understand probability, sounds like the police are frisking each racial group equally (in)accurately:
Whites were arrested in slightly more than 6 percent of the stops, blacks in slightly fewer than 6 percent. About 1.7 percent of whites who were stopped were found to have a weapon, while 1.1 percent of blacks were found with one.
So, what makes an officer suspicious?
In examining the stated reasons for the stops, as checked off by police officers on department forms, the center found that about 15 percent of the stops last year cited “fits a relevant description.” Officers can check off more than one reason, but in nearly half the stops, the category called “furtive movements” was cited. Nearly 30 percent of stops cited a category called “casing a victim or location”; nearly 19 percent cited a catchall category of “other.”
Here’s the data that the New York Times doesn’t want its readers to know, Heather MacDonald says:
Blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies.
Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.
The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator — a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times’s lead, which stated that “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped.”
You cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime, she notes.
These figures should not come as a surprise to anyone who either lives in a major city or who has been following the relevant crime statistics at any time over the last forty years. Unfortunately, both of these groups combined (regardless of the overlap) still constitutes a small percentage of the population.