Posted on August 17, 2012

95% of Last Year’s 882 NYPD School Arrests Involved Minorities

Rachel Monahan, NY Daily News, August 16, 2012

NYPD school safety officers were ticketing or arresting students last school year at an average clip of eleven pupils per day, data released Tuesday revealed.

Black and Latino students were collared in 95% of the 882 total arrests, while blacks and Latinos make up about 71% of the city’s student body of about a million pupils.

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Nearly three-quarters of the students arrested were male.

“If the Bloomberg administration is serious about helping young men of color succeed, then it must address these disparities and focus more resources on educating children, not arresting them,” argued Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Top NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said Lieberman was ignoring the circumstances of the complaints that prompted the arrests.

“The NYCLU’s kneejerk reaction to claim racism is as old as it is false,” he said. “It knows better than to compare arrests against population instead of description of suspects provided by victims.”

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