A significant majority of New Yorkers surveyed in a New York Times poll say the Police Department favors whites over blacks.
Opinions about stop-and-frisk are divided by race. Fifty-five percent of whites described the use of the tactic as acceptable; 56 percent of blacks called it excessive. Among Hispanics, 48 percent said it was acceptable, and 44 percent said it was excessive. > > Republicans, independents and residents of Queens generally support the practice; Democrats and Manhattanites generally deem it excessive.
Over all, 64 percent of New Yorkers said the police favored one race over the other, a steep rise from the early years of the Bloomberg administration, when less than half of residents agreed with that sentiment. The perception of police favoritism has not been as widespread since the final years of Mayor Giuliani’s tenure, when race relations were noticeably more tense. (The question has not been asked in a Times poll since 2003.)
In February 2012, the NYPD released stop-and-frisk statistics to the City Council that revealed the highest number of stops ever recorded in one year. Out of 685,724 stop-and-frisk stops, 87% percent of those stopped in 2011 were black or Latino, and nine out of ten persons stopped were not arrested, nor did they receive summonses. An NYCLU analysis showed that black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6 percent of stops in 2011, though they make up only 4.7 percent of the city’s population. The number of stops of young black men exceeded the city’s entire population of young black men.