After the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, the brass at the NYPD decided that they were not going to keep track of the races of those people shot by its officers.
The New York Police Department recently released 11 years of statistics on every bullet fired by its officers, including the reason for each shooting, the number of shots fired and how many bullets hit their target. But the reports stopped mentioning the race of the people shot after 1997 without saying why.
Testimony by a former police chief now offers an explanation. The former chief, Louis R. Anemone, said that while the data on people killed by officers were being compiled in 1998, the police commissioner, Howard Safir, ordered the department not to include the race of those killed by officers.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said in an e-mail message that the “race of suspects shot by the police generally comports with the race of shooting suspects.” When asked why the department continued to omit the data on race from its annual firearms reports, he wrote, “They are internal tactical reports that focus on tactical considerations, such as lighting, weapons, distance between suspect(s) and officer(s), and not race.
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“I don’t think there is any reasonable claim that the race of shooting victims is irrelevant,” said Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the civil liberties group. “It certainly is not something that the N.Y.P.D. should be hiding from the public, but that is exactly what they are doing. In a city where there have been lots of concerns about blacks being shot, I think this is information that needs to come out.
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The reports for 1996 and 1997 include the race of both the officer and the person who was shot. Those reports said that, adding up the two years, 89.4 percent of those shot by the police were black or Hispanic.
The 1998 report was the first to omit the data on race.
Instead of actually addressing a systemic law enforcement issue — the overrepresentation of black and Latino people in cases that involved the use of deadly force — they just scrubbed the numbers.
The people who don’t get why there’s so much distrust of the police in inner-cities just aren’t paying attention.
