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Taking a Closer Look at NYPD Pedestrian Stops for Racial Bias

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) stopped a half-million pedestrians because of suspected criminal involvement in 2006. Raw statistics for these encounters suggest large racial disparities, but do the data also indicate racial bias? Answering that question requires going beyond the raw statistics and carefully analyzing the data.

The NYPD specifically asked the RAND Corporation’s Center on Quality Policing to conduct such an analysis of the data and address whether the racial distribution of the stops suggests racial bias, whether certain officers seem to be disproportionately stopping nonwhites, and whether there are unexplained racial differences after the stops in the rates of frisk, search, recovery of contraband, use of force, and arrest.

The study found that the raw statistics, while easy to compute, distort the picture of race and policing in New York. Comparing the racial distribution of stops to three commonly used benchmarks—the racial distribution of New York residents, NYPD arrestees, and reported crime suspect descriptions—does not yield robust findings; rather, it generates very different results based on the same raw data.

Our analyses based on using more precise benchmarks to address concerns about biased officers and bias in stop outcomes do not eliminate the observed racial disparities in the raw statistics. However, they do indicate that the disparities are much smaller. For example, we flagged 15 officers that disproportionately stopped nonwhites, a relatively small fraction of the officers but still a critical issue for NYPD to scrutinize. We also found that some legitimate factors explain much of the difference in frisk rates between black and white suspects. Some of those factors include police policies and practices that can legitimately differ by time, place, and reason for the stop.

Any racial disparities in the data are cause for concern. However, accurately measuring the magnitude of the problem can help police management, elected officials, and community members decide between the need for incremental changes in policy, reporting, and oversight or the need to make sweeping organizational changes. Our findings do not absolve the NYPD of the need to monitor the issue, but they also imply that a large-scale restructuring of NYPD policies and procedures is unwarranted.

The study offers a number of recommendations to improve interactions between police and pedestrians during stops and to improve the accuracy of data collected during pedestrian stops.

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Return to CQP May 2008 newsletter