The Brooklyn district attorney's office this week released statistics about the enforcement of social distancing guidelines -- and it found that more than 87 percent of people arrested for breaking the guidelines were black.
The New York Times reports that stats from the Brooklyn DA's office show that "the police arrested 40 people for social-distancing violations from March 17 through May 4" and that "35 people were black, four were Hispanic and one was white."
The Times notes that most of the arrests came in predominantly black neighborhoods, even at a time when "video captured crowds of sunbathers, many without masks, sitting close together at a park on a Manhattan pier, uninterrupted by the police."
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says that he's disturbed by the racial disparities in the arrest rates, but he rejects comparisons to the stop-and-frisk program that was used by former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg that disproportionately targeted black residents.
"What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. “This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”
