NYC Minorities Frisked More but Arrested at Same Rate

The New York Times says in a very informative article about the overwhelming difference between stop and frisk rates of whites and others in New York City:

Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but no more likely to be arrested.
( . . .)
According to the analysis of the 2009 raw data by the Center for Constitutional Rights, nearly 490,000 blacks and Latinos were stopped by the police on the streets last year, compared with 53,000 whites.

But once stopped, the arrest rates were virtually the same. Whites were arrested in slightly more than 6 percent of the stops, blacks in slightly fewer than 6 percent. About 1.7 percent of whites who were stopped were found to have a weapon, while 1.1 percent of blacks were found with one. NYT

What I find most troubling is this: If police are able to find just as much reason to arrest whites even when whites are stopped and frisked only 1/10th as much as Blacks and Latinos, then if police INCREASED the stop and frisk rate of whites then they would probably also increase the rate of arrests made of whites.

Look at it this way, in the land of driverless white and black drone cars: If ALL cars have weapons in them but the white cars are stopped half as often, then police will find the same rate of weapons among both groups of cars, but white cars will proceed with weapons unmolested, even though increasing stops of white cars would increase the number of weapons found in white cars.

Or, let's look at it another way: In spite of an all out effort to find crime among Blacks, targeting Blacks almost ten times as much as whites, police have been unable to show that Blacks are more likely to have weapons than whites. Perhaps if the police stopped every single Black person who left his house, the police still wouldn't find more reasons to arrest Blacks than whites. And that's what these statistics are showing.