More Low-Level Arrests under de Blasio than Bloomberg

In the first seven months of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, the NYPD made more arrests for petty crimes than it did last year under former mayor Michael Bloomberg—and the racial breakdown of those arrests remains the same, according to numbers released yesterday by the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP). From January through July of 2014, police made more than 137,000 arrests for misdemeanor offenses, 86 percent of which involved people of color, according to data obtained by PROP from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. Last year’s number during the same period was just above 136,000, with 87 percent involving racial minorities.