Black people

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The background crowds in the film - which DO represent the New York City population of the time - were not filtered by race for the movie.

Back then, the city had blacks and asian - only they tended to stay in their own neighborhoods: Harlem and Chinatown. Particularly in Chinatown, the locals didn't want to leave their own turf - so of course you're not going to see any blacks or asians in mid-town or the Upper West Side.

Harlem came into its own after the Civil War, when many freed slaves went North since that's where all the jobs were (the South was decimated - besides which it was all rural).

There were also pockets of European ethnic neighborhoods: Hungarians and Germans in Yorktown (2nd Avenue around 78th Street) and Jews on the Lower East Side. They, too, also tended to stay in their neighborhoods (since many spoke their native languages). In the film, the woman in the store who identifies Sterling Hayden to Charles Drake is obviously Jewish, given her strong Yiddish accent (and why not? She's played by Molly Picon - who was with the Yiddish Theater).

"Don't call me 'honey', mac."
"Don't call me 'mac'... HONEY!"

I appreciate the OP's question, but the older lady whose stolen ring was recovered from the dead model's hand - she had an African-American maid. Of course, in those days, she would have been called "colored." (No disrespect intended.)

You're gonna complain about a movie that was made 66 years ago? That ship has sailed. Move on.

Interesting you should mention that. I just read the script and in the original screenplay the police officer who had arrested the guy in the pawn shop robbery was described as being black. But obviously somebody nixed that idea and in the final product the cop was a white guy.

OP does make an interesting point. Judging by how infrequently blacks appeared in Hollywood & early tv productions set in NYC, you'd never know there were any people living and working in the city who weren't white.

(For a different look, try Ragtime (1981), which is set in the early years of the 20th century.)

Of course, there have been many black people in New York City since even before the US was founded.

About 15,000 African slaves and their descendants were once unceremoniously buried under what is today Manhattan—and forgotten.
On Saturday, a new visitor center opened near the rediscovered cemetery from the 17th and 18th centuries to celebrate the ethnic Africans who had toiled, many unpaid, to help make New York the nation's commercial capital.... It's located a short walk from Wall Street, where African slaves once were traded.
Some of their remains were exhumed after 1991 and reburied on a third of an acre surrounded by high-rises amid bustling lower Manhattan....

The street-level center offers interactive exhibits showing that the African labor force was crucial to the prosperity of Dutch-colonized New Amsterdam in the 1600s, and later New York, governed by the English until the American Revolution. In 1776, there were about 25,000 people living in New York, about one-fifth of them slaves.

The slaves had come off ships from Africa and the Caribbean, landing in Perth Amboy, N.J., a busy duty-free port for the importation of slaves — men and women practicing Christian, Muslim and traditional African faiths.
They worked on docks and made roads or did farm and domestic work. The skilled artisans and craftsmen were associated with shipping, construction and various trades.

Some remained enslaved, while others gained some degree of freedom and could raise their families, though none had the full rights of the colonists.
But all were among those building a new nation.

When these early New Yorkers died, they were wrapped in shrouds and buried on more than 6 acres of land beyond the then official northern boundary of the city, at today's Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. Only non-Africans could be buried in the city proper.

After the 1741 slave insurrection, 18 slaves were hanged and 13 burned at the stake on vague charges of arson and conspiracy....

The forgotten burial place was rediscovered in 1991, when construction began on the foundation of a federal office building. The remains of about 400 men, women and children were found 20 feet underground....

"The bones show that they were overworked and malnourished, and some show signs of trauma," said Michael Blakey, a physical anthropologist and the scientific director of the African Burial Ground Project.
Slaves were raped, lynched and beaten at various times, according to historic accounts.
Even slave children were used as labor, some separated from their families and sold to the New York colonists....

New York abolished slavery in 1827.

It's a movie for entertainment. Not a documentary about racial representation in the population, or social justice.