Don’t buy Bratton’s bogus boasts
Manhattan: Based on a modest drop in the numbers of his department’s punitive interactions with New Yorkers, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton works hard to promote the false narrative that today’s NYPD practices a kinder, gentler kind of policing (“The NYPD: Winning the war on crime,” Op-Ed, Jan 20). His efforts bring to mind the comment sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.”
Despite the commissioner’s public relations roll-out focused not just on numbers, but also on extra training, an uptick in the use of body cameras and vague claims about new approaches to neighborhood policing, the NYPD, by any applicable criteria, continues to harass and sanction low-income people of color for engaging in low-level infractions or innocuous activities that have been virtually decriminalized in well-off white communities.
The vast majority of arrests in New York are for misdemeanors or lesser infractions and 85% to 95% of those arrests involve New Yorkers of color. For example, in 2015 the NYPD made about 20,000 arrests for the possession or sale of small amounts of marijuana, 92.5% involving New Yorkers of color, despite research showing that white people smoke and sell marijuana in numbers and proportions equal to or greater than persons of color. In 2014, 94.4% of the juvenile arrests in NYC involved African-American and Latino youth. Some 95% to 98% of the people incarcerated on Rikers Island are persons of color and they are so confined for two basic reasons: They are too poor to afford bail and NYPD officers have arrested and locked them up.
No effort to spin these or other relevant numbers can conceal the painful truth that NYPD practices remain an intrusive and oppressive presence in the everyday lives of New Yorkers of color.
Robert Gangi Director, Police Reform Organizing Project