As a black person, you are 25 times more likely to be shot in New York City, and also more likely to be arrested for pulling a trigger, than a white person, the city’s Police Department statistics show.
Of the 567 shooting victims in the first half of 2013, 74 percent were black, 21.5 percent were Hispanic and less than 3 percent were white, according to the data, the Daily News reports.
Blacks are also more likely to be arrested for shooting someone: Seventy percent of the 222 people arrested for this crime in the city during the same period were black.
According to the Daily News, this reveal has frustrated activists in the black community, who see it as evidence of discrimination against communities of color, as well as proof of the socioeconomic problems that poor neighborhoods have to battle. “It’s all a battle between the haves and the have-nots,” Tony Herbert, president of the National Action Network’s Brooklyn East chapter, told the Daily News.
NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly has used similar statistics to justify the controversial stop-and-frisk policy. “Last year, 97 percent of all shooting victims were black or Hispanic and reside in low-income neighborhoods,” Kelly recently said in response to Judge Shira Scheindlin’s landmark ruling that the policy was unconstitutional. “There were more stops with suspicious activity in neighborhoods with higher crime because that’s where the crime is.”
Scheindlin’s proposal to monitor the program is currently on hold because the city has appealed her decision, but the criticisms received have apparently been taken somewhat seriously. The same data showed that the stop-and-frisk numbers have plunged 80 percent, compared with the same period last year. From July through September, there were approximately 21,000 stops; last year there were more than 106,000.
Read more at the Daily News.