A sight to behold in Central Park
Racial disparity cited amid 20% rise in arrests during Adams’ 1st year in office
The number of arrests by the NYPD spiked by about 20% in 2022, the first year of the Adams administration — with the busts still overwhelmingly of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers, a new report finds.
Arrests for felonies and misdemeanors jumped from 131,731 in 2021 to 156,836 in 2022, with just under 90% of the arrestees Black or Hispanic, the Police Reform Organizing Project report concludes.
In 2022, 88% of arrests involved people of color, while in 2020 and 2021, the figure was 87%.
“It’s a matter of policy,” said Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project. “They deploy more police officers in the streets in poor neighborhoods of color, and the NYPD’s quota system puts pressure on police to make arrests and give out summonses. In higher-income communities with a larger white population, cops have told us there is no quota, or it’s a much lower quota.”
The NYPD has denied it imposes arrest quotas on cops.
An NYPD spokesman on Monday slammed the new analysis as misleading.
“What this claim fails to acknowledge is that calls for service to the NYPD via 911 and 311 increased significantly in 2022,” the spokesman said.
“In 2022, there were nearly 300,000 more 911 calls to the NYPD as well as 70,000 more 311 complaints that were routed to the NYPD than the year prior. The NYPD, under the Adams administration and the leadership of Police Commissioner [Keechant] Sewell, [is] intensively focused on the people, places and conditions that drive violence.”
Enforcement is based on a variety of factors, the spokesman said, including descriptions from victims and witnesses and what cops see firsthand.
“The NYPD does not engage in racially based enforcement,” the spokesman added. “It is unfortunate that the claim being raised, at a time where New Yorkers are embracing more engagement from their police, perpetuates a misunderstanding about police strategy critical to the well-being of every community in New York City.”
Gangi, a prominent NYPD critic, lost a long-shot primary bid to unseat Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017.
Under Mayor Adams, the NYPD has “escalated its discriminatory practices,” Gangi charges. “Arrests for one offense category, the misdemeanor possession of a forged instrument, involves 94% New Yorkers of color,” he noted.
Cops made 84,226 misdemeanor arrests in 2022 compared with 70,375 in 2021, the figures show.
The increase was driven in part by a large jump in petty larceny arrests, which rose 42% from 10,196 in 2021 to 14,577 in 2022. Petty larceny is charged when the value of stolen items is below $1,000, according to the state penal law.
Eighty percent of the people arrested for petty larceny were Black or Hispanic.
The racial breakdown was stark for misdemeanor charges across the board, from 90% Black or Hispanic for low-level assault to 82% for minor drug possession to 91.5% of fare-beating arrests.
Black people make up 25% of the population but more than 52% of felony arrests, the report said.