Brooklyn’s number one! In stop-and-frisks! Hooray?

Everyone in Brooklyn likes to take pride in our borough. Our Queen is better than your queen, our dollar slices are better than your dollar slices and we’ve even got Miss America, to boot. Of course, some things aren’t as fun to be the best at, like murders (which we’re not) or police harassment. Which, unfortunately, we are. Brooklyn managed to place three of its neighborhoods in the top five of total people stopped and frisked by the NYPD in 2011, according to a report the NYCLU was able to pressure them to release.

The 75th, 73rd and 90th precincts, covering East New York, Brownsville and Williamsburg were ranked one, two and five in number of stops by police in 2011. Of course, if you’re white, you probably had no idea about this, since blacks and Latinos were stopped 97 percent of the time in East New York, 98 percent of the time in Brownsville and 88 percent of the time in Williamsburg. The report comes as Ray Kelly swears there’s no racial component to stop-and-frisk and that it if the city gets rid of it, we’ll tumble back to a crack-era hellscape of bodies just piling up on the street corners. But the numbers paint a pretty stark picture of one section of the population being ignored by the police. Surely there are recent Williamsburg residents who look like they’re up to no good, no? In the meantime, don’t forget that if you do get stopped and want to report it, there’s an app for that.

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