86 Percent of Brooklynites in Court Are People of Color: Report

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The group, Police Reform Organizing Project, observed 243 cases in Brooklyn’s criminal court between January 2019 and June 2019 and found that only 14 percent of the cases involved white New Yorkers, despite the fact that white people make up nearly 40 percent of Brooklyn’s population.

“These numbers reflect the entrenched and long-standing problem of stark racial bias in NYPD tactics,” said Robert Gangi, the director of PROP, in a statement. “Every day that New York City’s political leaders sidestep this issue, our so-called criminal justice system continues its abusive and discriminatory practices.”

PROP performed court monitoring in all five boroughs. The racial breakdown in Manhattan was even starker than in Brooklyn, with 93 percent of the people arraigned in criminal court being people of color. Every borough hovered around 90 percent people of color, though Brooklyn had by far the largest sample size.

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“Court monitoring, like that of [PROP], helps to expose the harm, persistence, and racial bias of Broken Windows policing,” said Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of the Brooklyn Defender Services.

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