After weeks of public pressure, the Brooklyn district attorney's office has released data on enforcement of the city's social distancing ordinances, and the numbers are shocking.

According to the New York Times, the district attorney's report said borough police arrested 40 people for social-distancing violations from March 17 through May 4. Of those arrested, 35 people were Black, four were Hispanic and one was white.

This data confirms what many have been observing through pictures shared on social media, which show police exerting force on people violating social distancing orders in Black and brown neighborhoods, while white people have been congregating in wealthy neighborhoods, in clear view of police, with no consequences.

"More than a third of the arrests were made in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brownsville. No arrests were made in the more white Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope," the Times reports.

The disparity has many comparing social distancing enforcement to stop and frisk, the unconstitutional policy that saw police detain citizens, predominantly Black, for no apparent reason. 

Mayor Bill De Blasio spoke out against the comparisons during a press conference on Thursday (May 7). “What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. 

“This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”

He later acknowledged the disparity in policing for social distancing in a tweet:

According to the Times, the mayor and Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea claimed that "officers have used enforcement sparingly and fairly in millions of interactions across the city and that arrests have involved only a small number of people who refused orders to disperse."