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New York City Police to Record Age, Gender, and Color of People Questioned

Starting in June, the NYPD, the famous New York police force, will have to take note of the age, gender and color of the people they question. The Democratic-majority city council voted in favor of this law this week with the aim of transparency.

Published on 02/02/2024 1:48 p.m. Updated on 02/02/2024 1:52 p.m.

Reading time: 3 min NYPD police station in Times Square, January 31, 2024 in New York. (SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA)

In the United States, the approach to the subject of discrimination is very different from what is done in France. The census already takes into account a person’s ethnicity, to be able to produce more precise statistics. The law therefore goes in the same direction, hoping that more transparency can also denounce deviance. Supported by Democrats, it will now require police officers to fully document almost all of their public interactions. The New York council definitively adopted this controversial law after rejecting, on Tuesday, January 30, the veto of Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, although a Democrat and black.

The city’s 36,000 police officers will soon have to note the race, gender and age of citizens they question as part of an investigation. They will have to do this even if it is a simple witness in a basic case, or if they are trying to find someone suffering from Alzheimer’s who has disappeared from their home.

Counter or fuel the climate of mistrust?

The city council hopes the measure will hold police officers accountable and avoid racial profiling in a city where the practice of “stop and frisk” has been criticized for imposing arbitrary searches. too often to men of color. According to Kevin Riley, a black city councilor quoted by the Associated Press agency, part of the black community has difficulty with their interactions with the NYPD. There is “a form of fear”he said.

A recent incident has exacerbated the feeling of this sometimes questionable treatment of men of color. So this is not a scenario that falls within the scope of this new law, because it was a road check and, in the case of a road check, the police must already indicate this type of information. But the affair added to the climate of mistrust. Last Friday, the day the law was debated, a police officer stopped Yusef Salaam, a black man, who was driving with tinted windows. But this man, who is a municipal councilor, is not just anyone. He is one of the Central Park Five, the five people wrongly accused in 1989 of raping a white jogger in Central Park. These five people were convicted, with pressure at the time from businessman Donald Trump who called for the return of the death penalty, before being exonerated by their DNA.

A waste of precious time and unnecessary paperwork for detractors

Reactions to this new law are mixed among the police. The president of an NYPD detective association says it’s “one more step” towards the goal of the municipal council which would be “to destroy the police. He thinks that the gap between citizens and police will widen and that the police risk losing elements, frustrated by this mistrust and the additional paperwork.

The right expects the law to aggravate racial tensions and even Eric Adams, the black Democratic mayor of New York and a former police captain, does not want this law. He warned that it would waste precious police time, with the risk that they would then arrive too late for other, more important interventions. THE New York Post rightly recalled that the average time between the call to 911 and the arrival of the police at the scene of a crime had increased from 14 to 16 minutes in recent months.

2024-02-02 12:48:15
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