throughout the life of the program, black and Hispanic residents made up 80 to 90 percent of all stops (usually closer to 90 percent), in a city where they made up roughly half of the population. This disparity echoed an earlier bizarre statistic showing that 90 to 95 percent of all people imprisoned for drug offenses in New York in the nineties were black and Hispanic, despite studies showing that 72 percent of all illegal drug users in the city were white. Clearly a certain form of discretion was being exercised.
