A new analysis of the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk practice found that it resulted 400,000 stops of innocent Black and Latino New Yorkers, far more than of other racial groups, and those encounters frequently targeted young people of color.

The police also made more arrests for marijuana possession than any other crime in 2012, despite recent moves by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to minimize the number pot arrests on the street. Those findings from an analysis of NYPD stops released Wednesday by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the widespread use of the practice.

"Despite the welcome decline in the overall number of stops, the NYPD last year still subjected hundreds of thousands of innocent people to humiliating, intimidating and unjustified stop-and-frisk encounters,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement accompanying the report. "The city’s next mayor must make a clean break from the Bloomberg administration’s ineffective and abusive stop-and-frisk regime."

From federal court to the New York City mayoral race, stop-and-frisk is increasingly under assault. But the Bloomberg administration has steadfastly opposed suggestions to curb the widespread use of the practice, in which police stop people on the street on the suspicion that they have committed a crime.