Posted by Jay Livingston
On TV and in the movies, street cops rarely make a mistake. They have a sixth sense that they develop from years of experience on the streets. It tells them who’s dangerous and who’s not, who’s a criminal and who’s not, who’s holding (drugs, weapons) and who’s not.
On the real streets, things don’t always turn out that way. A few months ago, I posted some data from a study of the LAPD showing that the blue sixth sense was especially faulty when white cops suspected non-whites.
Now we have data on street stops by the NYPD. It’s not exactly the stuff of television.

Of the roughly 530,000 stops, 465,000 led to no further official action. Only 12% led to an arrest or a summons.
No wonder the NYPD wanted to keep the numbers secret, as they had up until seven years ago. Now the law requires them to publish the information – a law passed in the wake of a celebrated case of New York police killing an innocent man (four cops fired 41 bullets at him).
2 comments:
I wish that they would make their point-level crime data available as well! Or at least summarized to some level considerably smaller than precincts. I hope that it doesn't take another grievous miscarriage of justice to get a hold of it, though.
It would also be useful to know just what constitutes a "stop" (something that has to be reported and counted) and what does not.
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