New York City Justice

Robert Gangi, City Limits

• 90 percent of the people locked up on Rikers Island are New Yorkers of color, there mainly because a NYPD officer has arrested them and they are too poor to afford bail. Bail, for all intents and purposes, functions as a pre-trial detention program for poor people. 
• Since January 2021, 36 people have died on Rikers Island, a jail colony where most of the people confined are still presumed innocent. Most of the people who died there would likely still be alive had our criminal legal system not consigned them to a brutal correctional facility with woefully inadequate medical and mental health care. 
• 95 percent of juveniles who the NYPD arrests annually are youth of color. 
• The majority of NYPD arrests are for misdemeanors. Last year, 88 percent of such arrests involved New Yorkers of color. In some misdemeanor arrest categories, the racial disproportion was even more stark: 91.5 percent of fare evasion arrests involved New Yorkers of color; 94 percent of forged instrument arrests; 92.5 percent of possession of stolen property arrests; and 89 percent of contempt in the 2nd degree arrests. 
• Last year, over 52 percent of NYPD felony arrests involved Black New Yorkers who make up 25.1 percent of the city’s population.