New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made headlines last week with his assertion that white New Yorkers were stopped too often by officers patrolling the five boroughs, and minority-group members weren't stopped often enough. The New York Daily News says, “the mayoral math on stop-and-frisk doesn't add up.” A Daily News analysis of police data contradicts Bloomberg's claim, by looking at all crime suspects versus just violent crime suspects — particularly in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics are in the population minority, but make up the majority of stops.
Police numbers showed 6.9 percent of violent crime suspects were white — although whites made up 9.7% of the total number of people stopped. The News' review of police data found police listed a “violent” offense as the suspected crime on little more than one-quarter of the 532,911 stops made last year — mostly for “robbery.” The rest listed “nonviolent” offenses like weapons possession, larceny, pot possession and criminal trespass. When the lesser offenses are included, whites comprise 13.8% all crime suspects in the city — meaning they were stopped too infrequently.