NEW YORK — Broken windows leads to broken trust of the police in minority communities, the Legal Aid Society says, citing new NYPD data showing 91% of typical quality-of-life arrests last year were of Black and Latino suspects.
The 10-page analysis by the public defenders group comes as Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell have announced a renewed focus on quality of life crimes as they try to address what they consider a sense of disorder in pockets of the city.
“Decades of research have shown that this style of policing produces little to no public safety benefit while further alienating intensively policed communities, criminalizing poverty and exacerbating racial disparities in the criminal legal system,” says the Legal Aid Society report.
