Suit Seeks Police Data on Race of People Shot by NYPD Officers

AL BAKER, New York Times

- The New York Police Department recently released 11 years of statistics on every bullet fired by its officers, including the reason for each shooting, the number of shots fired and how many bullets hit their target. But the reports stopped mentioning the race of the people shot after 1997 without saying why.

Testimony by a former police chief now offers an explanation. The former chief, Louis R. Anemone, said that while the data on people killed by officers were being compiled in 1998, the police commissioner, Howard Safir, ordered the department not to include the race of those killed by officers.

The testimony by Mr. Anemone, a former chief of department, did not say why Mr. Safir made his decision, but the shift appeared to have occurred during a public furor over race and the police’s use of deadly force in the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, in February 1999. Mr. Diallo was killed in a barrage of 41 police bullets in the Bronx.

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