Every city should copy it.

When the Department of Justice revealed in early March that the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, had been systematically targeting black residents with onerous fines for minor violations, the first question many people asked was: Where else is this happening? Is Ferguson an outlier, or one of many cities around the country where such abusive and racist police practices are being employed?

Advocates for police reform were quick to say there were “other Fergusons” all around us, and that this one had been exposed only after Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson put the city in the national spotlight. But it was hard to find empirical evidence about how widespread the problem really is—for all the millions of tickets that police officers in America write for low-level crimes like drinking in public, riding a bike on the sidewalk, and playing music too loudly, law enforcement agencies don’t tend to make public, or even collect, demographic data on what kinds of people are getting written up for such violations and summoned to court.

This week New York City announced plans to reform its approach to summonses, creating a system designed to make it easier for people facing fines to show up for their court dates and defend themselves. One of the most important features of the reform package, however—and one that has been discussed less than it deserves to be—is the introduction of a “race box” that will appear on every single ticket that police officers in New York write. Even more striking: The racial identity of every individual who receives a summons will be aggregated in a central database and made public, so that anyone can download it and analyze it for patterns.

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