With Sean Bell fresh in the minds and hearts of people, and immigrants in Iowa being held in cattle yards, people of color have already gotten the message that we are viewed as animals or even as less than animals. So it should be no surprise that the New York City Police Department keeps better records on the dogs they shoot than the people they shoot.

Last week, the NYPD gave the City Council nine years’ worth of previously confidential detailed reports on the department’s shooting incidents.
But members of the council’s Public Safety Committee, which ostensibly oversees the NYPD, were barking up the wrong tree if they thought these long-sought-after Firearms Discharge Reports were going to reveal anything about the racial makeup of the people shot by New York’s cops.
On the other hand, among all the statistics and analyses were detailed breakdowns of the breeds of dogs shot by cops.

The reason why the NYPD keeps better stats on the dogs they shoot than on the people? Well the official reason is that doing so would “tax NYPD resources” but the more likely reason is that such reporting would reveal what the people of color communities in NYC already know, that it is our communities, and overwhelmingly our young people who are the targets. I could rattle off names of young people shot and killed by the NYPD, without having to look at stats. Sean Bell, Hilton Vega, Anthony Rosario, Frankie Arzuaga, Yong Xin Huang, Anibal Carrasquillo and really I could go on. But people love statistics, as if the statistics would negate what communities have been experiencing or what mothers have been mourning and protesting about. When stats were collected, this is what they looked like:

In 1996, for example, under the listing “Ethnicity of Perps,” it shows that, of the 413 people shot whose ethnicity was listed on police reports, 239 were black. That’s about 58 percent, or more than double the percentage of the city’s black population. Of the remaining shooting victims, 134 (or 32 percent) were Latino, and 32 (or 7.7 percent) were white. The human shooting stats for 1997 were similar: 181 blacks, or 57 percent; 99 Latinos, or 31 percent; and 26 whites, or 8.2 percent. As Dunn pointed out, close to 90 percent of the NYPD’s shooting victims were black or Latino.

Those stats are over 10 years old but given the cases I’ve mentioned and the cases of Amadou Diallo, Anthony Baez (not shot but choked to death), there is little doubt in my mind the stats have not changed as to who is on the death end of an NYPD issued firearm.

Via / The Village Voice