Analysis of Police Stops Across NY State and Monroe County for Understanding Racial Disparities in the County’s Stop and Frisk Policies

• Activity Number: 88 - Data Visualization in Practice
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2021 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
• Sponsor: Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion Outreach Group
• Author(s): Tasneem Zaihra Rizvi*
• Companies: SUNY-Brockport
• Keywords: Stop n Frisk; NY State; Heat Maps; Racial Disparities; Data4Justice

Abstract

Off late a lot is being said and done to investigate and improve interactions between police and the public. Our goal is to explore any possible discrimination in NYS and Monroe county's stop and frisk data by combining the power of visual exploration tools such as heat maps with inferential statistics. We use the data collected from Stanford Open Policing Project between 01-01-2010 to 12-14-2017. We will explore specific variables such as stop rate and use benchmark comparison for stop rates. So far, our analysis shows that for NYS, 55% of stops were of white people while only 26% of stops were of African Americans and 15% were of Hispanic people. This could be due to the extremely high number of whites, 10,757,819 (53%) in NYS than compared to any other race, 3,423,826 (17%) blacks and 3,754,537 (18%) Hispanics, while keeping in mind that whites are stopped at a rate 2.12 times higher than blacks. Currently, we are exploring the possible discrimination in Monroe County’s stop n frisk policies.