In data released by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, it has been revealed that 35 out of 40 who are apprehended in New York are black people. Tanzia Haq reports.
In the midst of the lockdown in New York, new data has emerged from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office which shows that 35 out of the 40 people arrested for violating social distancing protocols were black.
Between 17 March and 4 May, 40 people were arrested in New York City of which 35 were black, 4 were Hispanic and one was white. Mayor Bill de Blasio made a statement about the data to press rejecting the situation’s similarity to the ‘stop and frisk’ policy which was infamous in New York under Mayor Bloomberg. However, de Blasio tweeted that the number of black arrestees: “does not reflect our values”.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the cases, owing to a previous announcement by Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez that no low-level crimes pertaining to the pandemic will be prosecuted.
New York has been enforcing strict social distancing guidelines, with police officials making rounds of establishments in the city to enforce the rules and prevent heavy gatherings. Mayor de Blasio has said that despite the heavy enforcement, there needs to be some changes.
“When I saw those numbers I found them to be an indicator that something’s wrong and we need to fix it. And we will fix it,” said de Blasio about the arrests in Brooklyn.
He added that the NYPD has made arrests only on instances of extremes. “The numbers of arrests and summonses are extraordinarily low,” said the mayor, adding that in other circumstances there were even ten arrests a day. However, these stats have also come out after a study by the Foundation for AIDS Research found that the majority of the COVID-19 cases in the US are among the black population and nearly 60 per cent of deaths.
