Latino Officers Criticize Report Absolving NYPD Of Racial Bias

November 23, 2007 6:34 a.m. EST

New York, NY (AHN) - A Latino law enforcement group on Thursday criticized a report by a nonprofit organization that said there was no racial bias in the implementation of the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" policy.

The National Latino Officers Association of America criticized the report, which was published by the RAND Corp. The associations said the report "is comprised of endless excuses" that if left unchallenged, "is the justification for racial profiling, abuse and discrimination."

The report commissioned by the police department said that of the half a million encounters with pedestrians in 2006, 53 percent involved blacks, 29 percent were with Hispanics, 11 percent involved whites and 3 percent were encounters with Asians. But the RAND Corp. also said it "found that there are some legitimate factors that explain much of the difference between the frisk rate of black suspects and the frisk rate of white suspects," and that the differences in these rates were statistically insignificant.

Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, said in a statement the accusations of the Latino group exposed "deep ignorance of the statistical process employed by RAND, a nationally respected nonprofit, which subjected its research to rigorous peer review."

RAND Corp said the results of its study "does not absolve the NYPD of the need to monitor the issue, but it also implies that a large-scale restructuring of NYPD SQF policies and procedures is unwarranted."

Policies requiring officers to explain clearly to pedestrians why they are being stopped, new officers to be fully conversant with stop-question-frisk procedures, and the department to investigate officers with abnormal stop patterns were among the recommendations made by the report.