At the end of 2014, in a protest against then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, NYPD officers initiated a work slowdown that lasted about three weeks. An online magazine article about the action quoted a momentarily pleased young Black man: “Now I know what it must feel like to be a white person living in New York City.” He was commenting on his new found experience of cops not regularly targeting or harassing him for one reason, often bogus, or another.

Alas, for this young man and his fellow New Yorkers of color, especially for New Yorkers living in low income neighborhoods, their time of relaxing in the Big Apple was short lived. Relevant and reliable numbers reveal that under and throughout de Blasio’s two mayoral terms the NYPD resumed its aggressive, starkly biased tactics. To the surprise of no one, police practices during the single term of de Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, not just persisted in targeting New Yorkers of color, but expanded their discriminatory impact.

Sources for the aforementioned “relevant and reliable” numbers are undeniable. The Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS), a New York State agency, for example, collects arrest statistics for every local police department in our state including the NYPD which performs the informative service of breaking down its arrest data by race. For instance, you can find not only the total number of petty larceny arrests, the second most common arrest in our city, but also the numbers for the white, Black, Latino, and Asian New Yorkers arrested on that charge in a given year.

So what numbers........

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