New York state Attorney General Letitia James has launched an investigation into whether the New York Police Department has been illegally targeting people of color in its enforcement of fare-evasion laws in the New York City subway, her office said in a statement Monday.

Ms. James, a Democrat, sent a letter to NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea asking for fare-evasion and summons data, documents regarding police directives on enforcement and other information that would help determine whether NYPD officers exhibited a racial bias in their policing of the subway, according to the attorney general’s office.

NYPD spokeswoman Devora Kaye said in a statement that officers don’t consider racial demographics in enforcing the law. “The NYPD’s transit officers patrol day and night to keep six million daily riders safe and enforce the law fairly and equally without consideration of race or ethnicity,” she said.

In its statement Monday, the attorney general’s office cited data published by the NYPD that showed black and Hispanic people received nearly 70% of all civil summonses for fare evasion between October 2017 and June 2019, even though they only account for slightly more than half of New York City’s population.

During that same period, black and Hispanic New Yorkers made up nearly 90% of arrests for fare evasion, according to Ms. James’s office. Current and former NYPD officers have also recently alleged in sworn statements that through at least 2015, the police department engaged in an “unofficial policy” of targeting blacks and Hispanics in its enforcement of fare evasion and other low-level violations in the subway, Ms. James’s office said.