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CRIMINAL JUSTICE RACISM

MASSIVE thanks to this right here which helped immensely with this section. Very useful resource on its own (CATO person’s endorsement of it)

A few major links I’d cite when it comes to quickly proving systemic racism exists in the criminal justice system:

• There’s racial bias in our police systems. Here’s the overwhelming proof.
• Documenting Systemic Racism in the United States of America
• How Discrimination Creates White Privilege
• White Privilege and Systemic Racism Resources
• The U.S. Police System is Racist - Here’s the Proof - video by T1J on YouTube

Contents

Police Far Right Connections

Police Far Right Connections

• FBI 2006 Report on White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement (cited)
  • FBI warned about far-right infiltration of law enforcement back in 2006, concerned that many white nationalist groups were encouraging members to join the police
  • There was concern of white nationalists using law enforcement to get access to information or elected officials, which could be used maliciously and to push white nationalist agendas
  • Historically, these sorts of groups have promoted infiltration of law enforcement
  • These groups also encourage members to keep their racist beliefs under the radar, calling this “ghost skin”. As it turns out, this phrase has been used as a more general term to hide white supremacist beliefs.
    • In general, neonazis have been more frequently hiding their beliefs for tactical effectiveness
• https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law written by a former fbi agent
  • In spite of white supremacist groups having a history of trying to infiltrate police, the government’s response to this has been strikingly inadequate
  • Covers a lot of history about police ties to white supremacy

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/21/police-white-nationalists-racist-violence

• https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigated-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/

Historical Connections to White Supremacy

• https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1

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Police Subconscious Bias

Police Subconscious Bias

• Lecount 17
  • Highlights the philosophical (social power and group power) and racial reasons why white police officers have a discriminatory bias against African-Americans
  • Data collected via nationally representative survey which focuses on a number of specific racial attitudes of police officers to gain a broader understanding of their racial views and biases
  • Finds that officers believe blacks are more violent, lazy, and should not be given special treatment compared to most whites
  • Further highlights that those with less education adopt conservative views on race and the harmful impacts discrimination denial can have (i.e. shows how denial of racial discrimination can lead to the establishment of racial hierarchy)
• Voigt et al. 17
  • Used body camera footage from Oakland, California in April 2014
  • Found that even after controlling for a number of factors, racial disparities still existed in how police treated people: “We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop.”
    • This is the case in spite of there being widespread police use of body cameras
  • This has important implications for police relations with black communities, especially considering that such relations aren’t known to be great.

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Policing and Traffic Stops

Policing and Traffic Stops

• Wheeler 19
  • WHY DISSIPATING DISPARITIES MATTER
  • PREFACE FOR THE UTILITY OF FAIRNESS IN STOPS, ETC… “…There are two main reasons why criminologists are interested in fairness in the criminal justice system. One, the concept of fairness is intimately tied into legitimacy (Tyler, 2017; Tyler, Fagan, & Geller, 2014). Increasing perceptions of fairness is then expected to have downstream effects of the community cooperating with police, thus making investigations more effective (Braga et al., 2019)…. The second reasons criminologists have been interested in fairness in police behavior, the extent to which a formal label results in negative long term consequences, is more closely tied to equality of outcomes. This line of research has been focused on how DMC subsequently produces negative consequences, for both individuals touched by the criminal justice system, as well as broader societal impacts. At the individual level, formal labelling by the criminal justice system results in negative consequences, such as the ability to gain employment (Pager, 2003). Even absent an arrest, simply being stopped by the police appears to prompt individuals to avoid different social institutions (Brayne, 2014; Lerman & Weaver, 2013). At the aggregate level, such police contacts, warrants, and arrests have become so prevalent in particular minority neighborhoods they appear to have influenced overall levels of social control, and subsequently promoted more criminal behavior (Clear, 2008; Fagan, West, & Holland, 2002; Goldkamp & Vîlcicã, 2008; Hannon & DeFina, 2012; Morenoff & Harding, 2014). ” (Wheeler 19 [pg. 5-6]).
• Schleiden et al. 19
  • Examines through a longitudinal study differences in a nationally representative sample between 2,459 Black participants and 7,403 White Participants in waves throughout their adolescence, emerging adulthood, and young adulthood.
  • Finds that “Black participants were arrested at a rate that was seven times more frequent than White participants” and that “Neither contextual nor behavioral differences account for the arrest disparity between those who are Black and those who are White.”
  • This disparity was found despite having on average less alcohol use, less drug use, and similar rates of delinquency and arrest in emerging adulthood.
    • After holding the effect of contextual factors in adolescence, behaviors in emerging adulthood, and arrests in emerging adulthood constant, a significant difference in the number of arrests across race (S–B χd2iff(1) = 4.24, p < .05) emerges in young adulthood. Compared to those who identify as White (M = .62), those who identify as Black (M = 4.30) were arrested almost seven times more often.
• Gase et al. 2016
  • Results showed significantly higher likelihood of having ever been arrested among blacks, when compared to whites, even after con- trolling for a range of delinquent behaviors. These black–white disparities were no longer present after accounting for racial composition of the neighborhood, supporting the growing body of research demonstrating the importance of contextual variables in driving disproportionate minority contact with the justice system.
    • After controlling for factors such as demographic characteristics, including gender, age, time in the USA, time in current residence, and region, as well as a range of delinquent and criminal behaviors, black people’s likelihood of arrest increased from 1.40 times more likely to 1.58 times more likely to be arrested compared to white people.
    • For every one percentage point increase in the proportion of individuals who are white, they are 44% less likely to be arrested after controlling for other factors such as crime rate.
    • While community characteristics such as crime rate (X2 = 13.78, p = 0.0171) were associated with the odds of being arrested, they were not the primary drivers of racial/ ethnic disparities.
• Huizinga et al. 2007
  • Although self-reported offending is a significant predictor of which individuals are contacted/referred, levels of delinquent offending have only marginal effects on the level of disproportionate minority police contact. This finding held true for a measure of total offending and for violent and property offenses as well.
    • Although the African American prevalence rate of delinquent behavior ranges from 1.1 to 1.5 times that of Whites, the arrest and court referral rate is 1.5 to 3.4 times that of Whites.
    • For violent offenses, African Americans are 1.1 to 1.5 times more likely to report involvement in violent offenses but are 2 to almost 5 times more likely to be arrested or court referred than Whites. Also, African American violent offenders are roughly 2-5 times more likely to be arrested or referred to court. For property offenses, African Americans are 1.1 to 1.4 times more likely to report involvement in violent offenses but are roughly 1.4 to 3 times more likely to be arrested or referred to court than Whites, depending on the site; and African American property offenders are roughly 1.4 to 2 times more likely to be arrested or referred to court.
• Unnever et al. 2019
  • “The negative binomial results indicate that African Americans report significantly more trouble with the police while controlling for the respondents’ levels of offending, level of impulsivity, levels of anxiety and depression, gang membership, their family’s criminal involvement, whether they or their parents had serious mental health issues, the respondents’ current and expected economic conditions, their racial affinity, as well as other individual characteristics.”
    • Being African American increases the logs odds of expected counts of trouble with the police by 44.5% when other variables like offending are held constant.
    • African Americans report 45.9% more trouble with the police than whites even when other variables like offending are controlled.
• Andersen et al. 2015
  • Finds that being black is still a significant predictor of arrest after controlling for crime like vandalism, assault, and drug crimes (theft and property crime remained statistically insignificant).
• Crutchfield et al. 2012
  • Finds that race is a statistically significant predictor of police contact and that criminal activity is statistically insignificant (this is in step 4 after controlling for parent rewards for negative behavior).
• Kochel, Wilson & Mastrofski et al. 2011
  • Meta analysis across 27 independent data sets.
  • Finds that Black people are 30% more likely to be arrested than Whites while controlling for time and location of study, data collection method, and publication status (published or unpublished).
  • Controlling for the seriousness of the offense did not meaningfully reduce the race/arrest relationship (Q = .26, df = 1, p = .61). Controlling for whether the victim requested an arrest also was unrelated to the size of the effect (Q = .004, df = 1, p = .95). Additionally, controlling for the presence of witnesses (Q = .014, df = 1, p = .91), the quantity of evidence at the scene (Q = .137, df = 1, p = .71), the suspect being under the influence of drugs or alcohol (Q = .34, df = 1, p = .56), and the prior record of the suspect (Q = 1.36, df = 1, p = .24) each did not significantly reduce the race/arrest relationship. Furthermore, they found no significant difference in the mean effect size of studies that controlled for the occurrence or discovery of a new criminal offense during the course of the police/citizen encounter relative to those that did not (Q = .0004, df = 1, p = .98).
• Lytle et al. 2014
  • Finds that African Americans and Hispanics were more likely to be arrested than Whites and non-Hispanics after controlling for encounter characteristics such as the seriousness of offense, the characteristics of the arrestees, the geographic location, and the time of the study.
• https://stanford.app.box.com/v/Strategies-for-Change
  • Finds that OPD officers arrested 1 in 14 White men compared to 1 in 6 Black men even after controlling for factors such as neighborhood crime rate.
• Godette et al. 2011
  • Minorities were significantly more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system, even after controlling for criminal behaviors, substance abuse, mental health problems, and socio environmental risk.
  • After adjusting for factors such as criminal behaviors (i.e vandalism, theft, breaking and entry, the use of force to get money, assault, sexual assault, murder, driving while under the influence of substances, distribution or sale of drugs, trading sex for drugs, and gang membership) black people were 2.47 times more likely (OR=2.47) to be under criminal justice control compared to white people.
• Braun et al. 2018
  • Law enforcement officers in Texas who could charge shoplifters with two types of crimes (one more serious, one less so) due to a vaguely worded statute were more likely to charge black people and Hispanics with the more serious crime.
• Bulman et al. 2019
  • Finds that “the ratio of Black‐to‐White arrests is significantly higher under White sheriffs.”
  • The effects appear to be “driven by arrests for less‐serious offenses and by targeting Black crime types.”
• WaPo: Interview with Frank R. Baumgartner, Derek A. Epp and Kelsey Shoub 18 (book)
  • “Blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average”
  • Relative to whites, a black person in a car is 2x as likely to be pulled over and 4x as likely to be searched - despite the fact that they’re less likely to be found with contraband as a result of those searches.
• WaPo: DoJ 13
  • Compared to white people, black and latino drivers are much more likely to be searched once they have been pulled over. About 2 percent of white motorists were searched, vs. 6 percent of black drivers and 7 percent of Latinos.
• Simoiu et al. 17
  • A study of 4.5 million traffic stops by the 100 largest police departments in North Carolina
  • Found that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be searched than whites (5.4 percent, 4.1 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively), even though searches of white motorists were more likely than the others to turn up contraband (whites: 32 percent, blacks: 29 percent, Latinos: 19 percent).

• A 2018 Post investigation found that murders of white people are more likely to be solved than murders of black people. There’s also a strong correlation between areas that are black-majority and low-income and the areas with the lowest clearance rate for homicides.

• Similarly, a study published in June reviewed every reported homicide between 1976 and 2009 and found that “homicides with white victims are significantly more likely to be ‘cleared’ by the arrest of a suspect than are homicides with minority victims.”

• https://s18798.pcdn.co/annaharvey/wp-content/uploads/sites/6417/2019/12/Victimization_Harvey_Mattia.pdf

• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3627809
  • White people are more likely to receive a discount on their speeding tickets than African-Americans. The effect exists with 40% of cops, so more than a few bad apples

• According to a Justice Department study released in 2013, throughout the United States, black drivers are about 30 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Black drivers are also more likely to be pulled over for alleged mechanical or equipment problems with their automobiles, or for record checks. White people are actually more likely to get pulled over for noticeable traffic violations such as speeding. Black drivers are more likely to not be told why they were pulled over.

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/administrative-records-mask-racially-biased-policing/66BC0F9998543868BB20F241796B79B8

• https://people.ucsc.edu/~jwest1/articles/West_RacialBiasPolice.pdf

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Stop and Frisk

Stop and Frisk

• An ACLU study of stop and frisk incidents in Boston between 2007 and 2010 that did not result in a citation or arrest found that 63 percent of such stops were of black people. Blacks made up 24 percent of the city’s population. Incredibly, 97.5 percent of these encounters resulted in no arrest or seizure of contraband.

• Another ACLU study, this time on the use of stop-and-frisk in Milwaukee between 2010 and 2017, found that in nearly half of the more than 700,000 such stops, the police failed to demonstrate reasonable suspicion as required by the Constitution. The study found that between pedestrian stops and traffic stops, black people were six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, and that less than 1 percent of those searches turned up any contraband. Here again, while black and Latino drivers were more likely to be searched, they were 20 percent less likely to be in possession of any contraband.

  NYC Stop and Frisk:

  Some of these links talk about racial discrimination, others talk about general ineffectiveness of stop & frisk

• NYCLU, ACLU’s branch in New York
  • White people generally made up only about 10 percent of police stops, despite making up about 45 percent of the city. Black and Latino people made up more than 80 percent of the stops, despite making up just over 50% of the city population.
  • Consistently, between 85 and 90 percent of such stops produced no arrest, citation or evidence of criminal activity.
  • [Fewer than 1 percent](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/it-takes-a-lot-of-stop-and-frisks-to-find-one-gun/) **of stops produced a gun, the alleged reason for the policy.
• Gelman et al. 07 (non-paywall)
  • Analysis of 125,000 police stops by NYC police department over a period of 15 months
  • Finds that even after controlling for precinct variability and race-specific estimates of crime participation, black people were still disproportionately stopped compared to whites
• Remster and Cramer, 2018
  • Investigates disparities in police NYPD use of force during the use of stop-and-frisk-and there’s a lot
  • “The results, which appear in Table 2, show that black civilians have 27 percent higher odds of experiencing force during a stop than white civilians and 28 percent higher odds of officers drawing their guns (OR = 1.27 and 1.28, respectively). Importantly, these findings are net of alternative explanations including civilian behavior, the success of the stop, local crime rates, and neighborhood context.
  • ”Still, it is striking that when police do not report any criminal behavior by stopped civilians, black individuals experience 29 percent higher odds of experiencing force than white individuals. Turning to gun use in model 2, the results are again consistent with those in Table 2, albeit the magnitude of the race relationship is slightly smaller (OR = 1.20 compared to 1.28 in Table 2). Nonetheless, together these results clearly demonstrate that the racial disparity persists even when individuals are not arrested nor found with contraband.
  • Although the racial disparity is smaller for any force when police arrest individuals or find contraband and/or weapons compared to when they are innocent, the disparity grows monumentally for potential lethal force from 20 to 60 percent higher odds. As further evidence that the race of the civilian is directly related to potential lethal force and not a proxy for behavioral differences, the odds ratios for civilian behavior decrease
  • For both productive and nonproductive stops, black civilians are more than three percentage points more likely to be subjected to force during a stop than white civilians.
  • Where the marginal effect is below 0.1 percentage points for stops in which the civilian was not arrested and no contraband or weapons were seized, it is greater than 0.4 percentage points at every age for stops that resulted in arrests and/or seizures. These differences are statistically significant. In short, black civilians are more likely to experience potential lethal force when no criminal behavior is uncovered and the likelihood increases at least four fold when officers locate criminal activity.
  • If black civilians were treated identically to whites, we estimate that 61,207 fewer stops of black civilians would have included force and 1,814 fewer stops of black civilians would have involved police gun use. Put differently, there would have been 21 fewer uses of force on black civilians per day and 4.4 fewer guns drawn on black civilians per week over our 8 years observation period.
• MacDonald et al. 16 (cited)
  • Examines the effectiveness of NYC’s stop & frisk program using reported crimes and arrests from 2004 to 2012
  • “The findings suggest that saturating high crime blocks with police helped reduce crime in New York City, but that the bulk of the investigative stops did not play an important role in the crime reductions. The findings indicate that crime reduction can be achieved with more focused investigative stops.”
    • Finds that even with statistically significant crime reductions, they weren’t very large - only leading to a 5-9% crime reduction in certain areas

• https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/nathaniel_barlow_thesis.pdf

• https://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR534.html found small differences overall but makes a lot of recommendations

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Bias in Police Use of Force

Bias in Police Use of Force

Black people are overrepresented as victims of police brutality, both with use of force and with shootings specifically. This holds true even after accounting for relevant factors that would otherwise mask discrimination. To be honest, the data on this particular topic is oftentimes shaky and unreliable, and violent crime is a small portion of what police deal with, so if you want to prove that there’s systemic racism in the police force at large, this isn’t the first section you want to go to.

• Nix et al. 17
  • An analysis of 990 fatal police shootings using data compiled by The Washington Post in 2015.
  • Finds that “Black civilians were no more or less likely than White civilians to have been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians when they were fatally shot by police.”
  • Also finds that “Black civilians who died by police gunfire were more than twice as likely as Whites to have been unarmed”
  • 24% of Black civilians (φ = .04, p = .25) were not attacking officers which is no different from 17% of White civilians (φ = .14, p < .01).
  • Logistic regression results that account for other variables show that Black people actually have a 43% increased odds of not attacking police officer(s) or other civilians when fatally shot OR = 1.43 (caution: this result was not statistically significant so essentially Black civilians were no more or less likely than White civilians to have been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians when they were fatally shot by police.)
• Scott et al. 2017
  • “Results suggest that officers are more likely to shoot Black suspects, even when race-based differences in crime are held constant.”
  • “The intercept is positive and significant, b = 1.75, t(208) = 4.37, p < .001, even when equating Black and White criminal activity. This shows that, in otherwise average metropolitan statistical areas, police are more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect, even in the absence of racial differences in criminal activity.”
• Buehler et al. 15
  • Concludes that black people were 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
  • They also concluded that black people were more likely to be unarmed than white people who were in turn more likely to be unarmed than Hispanic people shot by the police.
• DeGue et al. 16
  • Concludes that the mortality rate of legal interventions among black and Hispanic people was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher than that among white people.
• Edwards et al. 18
  • Finds the mortality rate by police per 100,000 was 1.9 to 2.4 for black men, 0.8 to 1.2 for Hispanic men and 0.6 to 0.7 for white men.
• Edwards et al. 19
  • Black, Indian, and Native people are significantly more likely to get killed by the police than white people
  • “For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.”
• Ross 2015
  • This study of police shootings from 2011 to 2014 found “a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being black, unarmed, and shot by police is about 3.49 times the probability of being white, unarmed, and shot by police on average.”
  • The study also found “no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” So, there is no evidence to suggest that the counties with relatively high black to white crime rate ratios are those with disproportionately high rates of racial disparities in police use of lethal force against unarmed individuals.
  • The racial crime rate difference regression coefficients are small & weak (~ -00.1 to -0.03) with even larger standard errors (~0.05) and they’re statistically insignificant for predicting police killings.
• Ross et al. 20
  • Finds a “strong and statistically reliable evidence of anti-Black racial disparities in the killing of unarmed Americans by police in 2015–2016.”
  • Density curves that show the natural log of the posterior distributions of the relative probability (for Black unarmed individuals relative to White unarmed individuals) of being killed by police are all greater than 0 across all violent crime benchmarks which shows anti-black disparity.
• The Guardian 15 (Cited)
  • POC are killed at a disproportionate rate, even more so when unarmed
  • Keep in mind that this is baseline statistical analysis which doesn’t account for much stuff. Someone could argue that these raw disparities are driven by something other than racism, as these disparities don’t account for a number of other factors at play

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• Feldman et al. 18
  • Police disproportionately target low-income and POC neighborhoods
  • “Overall, police-related death rates were highest in neighborhoods with the greatest concentrations of low-income residents and residents of color”
• Fagan et al. 00
  • “Our Empirical Evidence suggests that policing is not about disorderly places, nor about improving the quality of life, but about policing poor people in poor places. This strategy contradicts the policy rationale derived from Broken Windows theory, and deviates from the original emphasis on communities by focusing on people. Racially disparate policing reinforces perceptions by citizens in minority neighborhoods that they are under unparticularized suspicion and are therefore targeted for aggressive stop and frisk policing. Such broad targeting raises concerns about the legitimacy of law, threatens to weaken citizen participation in the co-production of security, and undercuts the broader social norms goals of contemporary policing.”
• Lancet Journal: Bor 18 (press release)
  • Instances of police brutality harm mental health
  • “Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population.”
• Menifield et al. 18
  • Bias in policing isn’t just a “few bad apples,” nor is it a problem among white police officers specifically; policing practices inherently operate in a discriminatory manner.
  • The disproportionate killing of African Americans by police officers “is likely driven by a combination of macro‐level public policies that target minority populations and meso‐level policies and practices of police forces.”
  • “Much research in organizational theory suggests that the problem of disproportionate killing may be fundamentally institutional.”
  • Also outlines past studies on policing that recognize the disproportionate impacts of institutional policies on minorities
• Significance of police bias in shootings: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793
  • “We find that Latina women and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women face lower risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.” (among the leading causes, not the leading cause)
  • It’s worth noting that these numbers don’t distinguish between justified and unjustified police shootings. Many of these shootings were indeed justified, but this shouldn’t take away from the role bias can have in these shootings, what led up to these shootings, etc.

CLAIM: But the CDC doesn’t show police are the leading cause of death for Black men.

This is just because “police-related deaths” is not a metric the CDC measures or tracks. Even then, the CDC shows that “legal intervention” is among the leading causes of death among black men ages 15 to 24.

• Fagan & Campbell 20
  • Analyzes 3,933 police killings to figure out if the justification of shootings differs in any meaningful way depending on the race of the victim
  • “We find that, across several circumstances of police killings and their objective reasonableness, Black suspects are more than twice as likely to be killed by police than are persons of other racial or ethnic groups; even when there are no other obvious circumstances during the encounter that would make the use of deadly force reasonable.”

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

• https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1882&context=articles

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Juries and Jury Selection

Juries and Jury Selection

• https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=wvlr
  • In this study, two groups of mock jurors were given a collection of race-neutral evidence from an armed robbery, with one group’s alleged perpetrator being shown to be light-skinned and the other dark-skinned.
  • Jurors were significantly more likely to evaluate ambiguous, race-neutral evidence against the dark-skinned suspect as incriminating and more likely to find the dark-skinned suspect guilty.
• https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1330&context=facpubs
  • Between 1990 and 2010, state prosecutors struck about 53% of black people eligible for juries in criminal cases, as opposed to 26% of white people. The study’s authors testified the odds of this taking place in a race-neutral context were around 1 in 10 trillion.
  • After accounting for factors prosecutors select for which tend to correlate with race, black people were still struck twice as often.
  • Michigan’s state legislator had previously passed a law** stating death penalty defendants who could demonstrate racial bias in their jury selection could have their sentences changed to life without parole. The legislature later repealed that law.
• https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2582&context=articles
  • “Psychologists have suggested that racial bias among Whites is more likely when salient norms regarding racism are absent. In such situations, White perceivers often let their guard down, allowing their behavior to be influenced by anti-Black attitudes and prejudice.”
  • In two experiments conducted by the authors, the white jurors were significantly more likely to vote to convict a black person accused in a case involving a non-race salient fact pattern than in one involving a race salient fact pattern. This suggests that the white mock jurors were motivated to appear less racist the more racially salient the case before them.

• In a 2010 study, “mock jurors” were given the same evidence from a fictional robbery case but then shown alternate security camera footage depicting either a light-skinned or dark-skinned suspect. Jurors were more likely to evaluate ambiguous, race-neutral evidence against the dark-skinned suspect as incriminating and more likely to find the dark-skinned suspect guilty.

• https://www.nacdl.org/Article/June2018-ThePersistenceofDiscrimination

• https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/127/2/1017/1826107

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Death Penalty Racism

Death Penalty Racism

A number of studies show disparities in the rates at which whites and blacks are given death sentences, even after controlling for relevant factors. These studies also show that white victims are favored over black victims by a considerable margin.

• https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/legacy/documents/WashRaceStudy2014.pdf
  • Analysis of 33 years of data from Washington State to determine which characteristics best predict the decision to implement a death sentence.
  • Black defendants are 4.5 times as likely to receive a death sentence as similarly-situated whites.
  • Other factors (presence of aggravating circumstances, involvement of sex crimes, hostage-taking, etc.) explain only a small fraction of the disparity in prosecutors’ and juries’ decision to invoke the death penalty against black defendents.
  • Race was by far the most influential statistical factor.

• A study of death penalty rates of black perpetrators/white victims vs. white perpetrators/black victims through 1999 showed similar discrepancies. Interestingly, the study found that blacks are underrepresented on death row in proportion to the proportion of murders they commit. But this is largely because most black murderers kill other black people, and prosecutors are far less likely to seek the death penalty when the victim is black.

• Black people are also more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder when the victim was white. Only about 15 percent of people killed by black people were white, but 31 percent of black exonerees were wrongly convicted of killing white people. More generally, black people convicted of murder are 50 percent more likely to be innocent than white people convicted of murder.

• Innocent black people are also 3.5 times more likely than white people to be wrongly convicted of sexual assault and 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes. (And remember, data on wrongful convictions is limited in that it can only consider the wrongful convictions we know about.) (cited)

• A 2000 study of federal cases found that federal prosecutors were about 50 percent more likely to offer a plea bargain to white murder suspects than black suspects that allowed them to avoid the death penalty.

• https://www.uky.edu/AS/PoliSci/Peffley/pdf/Eberhardt.2006.Psych%20Sci.Looking%20Deathworthy.pdf
  • Analysis of the relationship between racial stereotyping and death sentence convictions.
  • Black defendants who possessed darker skin and more “stereotypically black” features were twice as likely to be given the death penalty when accused of murdering a white person, as compared to lighter-skinned blacks with less “stereotypically black” features.
  • This disparity disappears completely when the murder victim is black.

• https://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-death-penalty-fact-sheet/

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jc30ECidjRdsP5BrSyt5lu07DOP6FB4PGmC9Ok9tiMI/edit might be useful for posting many stats on the subject at once

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Prosecutors, Discretion, and Plea Bargaining

Prosecutors, Discretion, and Plea Bargaining

Depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved with a plea bargain before ever getting to trial. While most legal observers agree that plea bargaining is widely abused and does little to serve the interests of justice, most also believe that if every defendant were to insist on a trial, the system would come grinding to a halt. The bias here comes in when we look at who gets plea bargains, what kinds of deals they’re offered and how many, though innocent, feel pressured to accept.

• A 2017 study of about 48,000 criminal cases in Wisconsin showed that white defendants were 25 percent more likely than black defendants to have their most serious charge dismissed in a plea bargain. Among defendants facing misdemeanor charges that could carry a sentence of incarceration, whites were 75 percent more likely to have those charges dropped, dismissed or reduced to a charge that did not include such a punishment.

• A 2011 summary of the research on race and plea bargaining published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance concluded that “the majority of research on race and sentencing outcomes shows that blacks are less likely than whites to receive reduced pleas,” that “studies that assess the effects of race find that blacks are less likely to receive a reduced charge compared with whites,” and that “studies have generally found a relationship between race and whether or not a defendant receives a reduced charge.”

• A 2013 study found that after adjusting for numerous other variables, federal prosecutors were almost twice as likely to bring charges carrying mandatory minimums against black defendants as against white defendants accused of similar crimes.

• A 2008 analysis found that black defendants with multiple prior convictions are 28 percent more likely to be charged as “habitual offenders” than white defendants with similar criminal records. The authors conclude that “assessments of dangerousness and culpability are linked to race and ethnicity, even after offense seriousness and prior record are controlled.”

• https://archive.triblive.com/news/nation/trib-investigation-cops-often-let-off-hook-for-civil-rights-complaints/

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Judges and Sentencing

Judges and Sentencing

• U.S. Sentencing Commission 17
  • Extensive multivariate regression analysis indicates black male offenders receive 19.1% longer sentences than similarly-situated white male offenders (white male offenders with similar past offenses, socioeconomic background, etc.)
    • Keep in mind that multivariate regression analysis is imperfect and can’t demonstrate causation, this is likely to be pointed out as a limitation if the other person is familiar with the study. This specific study tries to account for those sorts of limitations from an earlier 2012 report, meaning the authors have already recognized and meaningfully tried to account for limitations like these.
  • This disparity seems to stem mostly from black males being 21.2% less likely to receive non-government sponsored downward departures or variances.
    • Non-government sponsored departures and variances refer to deviations from standard sentencing guidelines due to judicial discretion.
  • Black males who do receive non government-sponsored departures and variations still serve 16.8% longer sentences than white males on average.
  • In contrast, when sentencing length follows standard guidelines, that disparity is only 7.9%, and a substantial assistance departure for both groups nullifies that disparity.
  • IN SUMMARY - much of the sentencing disparity between similarly situated black males and white males comes down to judicial discretion to deviate from standard sentencing guidelines.
  • BONUS - regression analysis suggests violence in a criminal’s history does NOT explain sentencing disparities between black males and similarly situated white males - the effect of that factor seems to be statistically insignificant.
  • ADDENDUM - Some have asked to clarify a sentence at the end of this report, where its authors write it cannot be used to prove discrimination on the part of judges. First, that disclaimer warns against inferring active discrimination as opposed to implicit bias - the disclaimer does not say the report cannot be used to prove implicit bias. Second, researchers are often quick to point out that their research cannot prove a point, especially regarding intent. It can only strongly suggest a point - natural limitation of multivariate regression analysis.

• A 2015 study in the Journal of Legal Studies found that black federal judges are about 10 percentage points more likely to be reversed on appeal than white federal judges. The study adjusted for variables like who appointed the judges, judicial circuits and demographic data.

• Mitchell 05
  • Meta-analysis of 71 studies
  • “Analyses indicate that African-Americans generally are sentenced more harshly than whites; the magnitude of this race effect is statistically significant but small and highly variable”
    • High variability is explained by differences in methodology between studies
  • Specifically, African-Americans are 1.28 times more likely to be punished more harshly than white people on average.
  • They are 1.13 times more likely to be punished harsher than white people when even after taking into account precision of measurement and presence of key variables (i.e utilizing more precise measures of criminal history and offense seriousness, and included controls for both type of defense counsel and method of disposition, while holding all other variables at their respective means.)

• https://counciloncj.foleon.com/reports/trends-key-findings/overview/ https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/spring2020/incarceration

• https://www.nber.org/papers/w24615

• Jordan & Freiburger 10
  • “Examining the Impact of Race and Ethnicity on the Sentencing of Juveniles in the Adult Court”
  • “The findings suggest that race and ethnicity do impact the sentencing outcomes of convicted youthful offenders. In addition, the results suggest that the combination of race and other factors (i.e., interactions) has an effect on sentencing.”
  • “We also found that the interaction of race and other factors further influence sentencing decisions. It is interesting that having prior contact with the juvenile justice system and being Black increased the likelihood of receiving prison versus jail, and it decreased the likelihood of the same for Whites. These opposite findings could mean that judges view prior record differently for these racial groups, with prior records representing more dangerousness for Blacks (i.e., greater chance of prison) but not for Whites (i.e., lower chance of prison).”
• http://www.famm.org/mandatory-minimums/
  • Mandatory sentencing laws disproportionately affect minorities and, because of their severity, families were destroyed.
• https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/uploads/764bf150-13d8-4330-b08b-b04ae313308f/disparity.pdf
  • In a review of 40 studies into the linkage between race and ethnicity and sentencing severity, researchers found that at both the state and federal levels, black people were more likely to receive more severe sentences than their white counterparts.
  • This finding holds true even when controlling for differences in criminal histories and the effects of policies that have a disparate impact on people of color, like drug laws and hot spots policing practices discussed in these studies.
  • 43% of studies at the state level and 68% at the federal level reported direct racially discriminatory sentencing outcomes, impacting both the initial decision to incarcerate and the length of any ultimate sentence to incarceration.

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Prison and Incarceration

Prison and Incarceration

Black people are of course overrepresented in the prison population. And, as noted in one particular study below, they’re overrepresented even after you account for variables such as the crime rate among blacks.

• A 2016 Yale University study of solitary confinement in 48 jurisdictions across 45 states found that black prisoners were more likely to be held in isolation than white prisoners. The discrepancy was even greater among women — black women made up 24 percent of the female prison population but 41 percent of those who had been held in isolation (that figure came from 40 jurisdictions.)

• A report found that in Texas, black prisoners are much more likely to be sent to solitary confinement, even as Texas prisons are phasing out the practice.

• In surveying the research on the topic, the Sentencing Project estimates that 61 to 80 percent of black overrepresentation in prisons can be explained by higher crime rates in the black population. (Of course, those higher crime rates themselves could be due in part to racial bias.) The rest is probably because of racial bias.

• The BJS found that African American males are 6 times more likely to be incarcerated than white males.

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Drug War and Racism

Drug War and Racism

Black people are consistently arrested, charged and convicted of drug crimes including possession, distribution and conspiracy at far higher rates than white people. This, despite research showing that both races use and sell drugs at about the same rate.

For more general data on the Drug War, see the Drug Decriminalization section.

• A 2014 ACLU survey of SWAT teams across the country found that “dynamic entry” and paramilitary police tactics are disproportionately used against black and Latino people. Most of these raids were on people suspected of low-level drug crimes.

• The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties
  • While White & Black Americans admit to using and selling illicit drugs at similar rates, Black Americans are VASTLY more likely to go to prison for a drug offense.
  • In 2002, Black Americans were incarcerated for drug offenses at TEN TIMES the rate of White Americans.
  • Today, Blacks are 3.7x as likely to be arrested for a marijuana offense as Whites, despite similar usage.
  • 97% of “large-population counties” have racial biases in their drug offense incarceration.
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199004263221706
  • “During the six-month period in which we collected the urine samples, 133 women in Pinellas County were reported to health authorities after delivery for substance abuse during pregnancy. Despite the similar rates of substance abuse among black and white women in our study, black women were reported at approximately 10 times the rate for white women (P<0.0001), and poor women were more likely than others to be reported. We conclude that the use of illicit drugs is common among pregnant women regardless of race and socioeconomic status. If legally mandated reporting is to be free of racial or economic bias, it must be based on objective medical criteria”

• In contrast to the assertion that blacks are more likely to be arrested because they’re more likely to use drugs in public, a 2002 study of narcotics search warrants in the San Diego area — that is, warrants to search for drugs in private homes — found that black and Hispanic residents were “significantly over-represented as targets of narcotics search warrants,” even after adjusting for usage rates. The study also found that “searches of White suspects were more successful in recovering the targeted drug than were searches of either Black or Hispanic suspects.”

• Mitchell 2015
  • High numbers of African American arrests and charges of possession show that although most drug users in the United States are white, black people are the largest group being targeted as the root of the problem. It also concluded that minorities have been disproportionately arrested for drug offenses and the difference could not “be explained by differences in drug offending, non-drug offending, or residing in the kinds of neighborhoods likely to have heavy police emphasis on drug offending.”

• A study by Andrew Golub, Bruce Johnson, and Eloise Dunlap affirms the racial divide in drug arrests, notably marijuana arrests, where black people with no prior arrests (0.9%) or one prior arrest (4.3%) were nearly twice as likely to be sentenced to jail as their white counterparts (0.4% and 2.3%, respectively).

• Nationwide African-Americans were sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than other races, even though they only comprised 13% of regular drug users.
  • They make up 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes.

• A 2008 paper stated that drug use rates by black people (7.4%) were comparable to those by whites (7.2%), and since there are far more white people than black people, 72% of illegal drug users in America are white, and only 15% are black.

• By the end of the Bush presidency, 9.18% of all black people in the United States were in prison, on probation, or on parole, but only 1.76% of the white population in the United States were in one of those situations. In 1993, there were 6 times as many black Americans in local jails per 100,000 inmates as there were white Americans. From 1989, when Bush took office, to 1993, when he left, the number of black males in American prisons increased by 300,000 people. The number of white males increased by 50,000 inmates. The number of sentences for drugs increased from 25,309 in 1989 to 48,554 in 1993.

• According to Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow and a professor of law at Stanford Law School, drug trading is done at similar rates all over the US, but most people arrested for it are colored. Together, blacks and Hispanics were 58% of all prisoners in 2008 but only one quarter of the US population. Most prisoners are arrested for drug related crime, and in at least 15 states, three quarters of them are black or Latino.

• A 2006 study (non-paywall) concluded that black people were significantly overrepresented for those arrested for drug delivery offenses in Seattle. It also found that it was a result of law enforcement focusing on crack offenders and outdoor venues and dedicating resources to racially-heterogeneous neighborhoods.

• A 2012 study found that black youths were less likely than white youths to use or sell drugs but more likely to be arrested for doing so.

• The ACLU found that Iowa had the highest racial disparity of the fifty states.
  • Black people in Iowa were arrested for marijuana possession at a rate 8.4 times higher than whites.
  • Black people are 7.3 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana compared to white people despite similar usage.
• According to figures from the National Registry of Exonerations (NER) black people are about five times more likely to go to prison for drug possession than white people. According to exoneration data, black people are also 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes.
  • This study also gives details on wrongful conviction of blacks in general, talking about a number of crimes

• When Harris County, Tex., saw a flaw in how drug testing was conducted at its crime lab, officials went back and exonerated dozens of people who had been wrongly convicted for possession — most pleaded guilty, despite their innocence. This is because prosecutors often promise harsher sentences or more charges for defendants who take a case to trial. Black people comprise 20 percent of the Harris County population but made up 62 percent of the wrongful drug convictions.

• Not included in these wrongful conviction figures are cases in which police and narcotics task forces conducted mass arrests of entire black or Latino neighborhoods or towns. Hundreds of people were persuaded to plead guilty to drug charges. By the NER’s estimate, there have been more than 1,800 such “group exonerations” in 15 cities since 1989. Almost all those exonerated were black or Latino.

• A 2017 report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune of Florida’s drug convictions found that while blacks made up 17 percent of the state’s population, they made up 46 percent of felony drug convictions since 2004. Blacks were also three times as likely to get hit with — and made up two-thirds of — the sentencing enhancements for committing drug crimes near a school zone, church, park or public housing. In all, when blacks and whites committed similar drug crimes, blacks on average received a sentence that was two-thirds longer. In some parts of the state, it was two or three times longer.

• An analysis of drug war data by the Vera Institute of Justice published found that “the risk of incarceration in the federal system for someone who uses drugs monthly and is black is more than seven times that of his or her white counterpart.”

• A 2000 study found that the disproportionality of black drug offenders in Pennsylvania prisons was unexplained by higher arrest rates, which suggested the possibility of operative discrimination in sentencing.

• A 2017 report of civil asset forfeiture seizures in Chicago showed that the vast majority of such actions were in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The average value of the property seized was $4,553; the median value was $1,049.

• DPA 16
  • The war on drugs is overtly racist – Nixon’s domestic policy chief explains it himself
  • “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” ~ John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief
• BJS Racial Disparity in U.S. Drug Arrests
  • Since black people constituted 40% of drug violation arrests but only 13% of admitted drug users. There was an apparent disparity of 27%, analytically refined to 23%.
  • Further analysis indicated 10% of the 23% were attributable to race-neutral factors, but the analysis could not explain the remaining 13%.
  • 16% of those who sold drugs were black, but 49% of those arrested for doing so were black.
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/
  • Between 1986 and 1997, the number of federal drug prisoners quintupled, with 74% of those minorities convicted of low-level drug offenses and sentenced under mandatory minimum laws and later added conspiracy amendments to the law.

• A 1992 study found that mandatory minimum sentencing caused blacks and Hispanics to receive more-severe sentences than their white counterparts from 1984 to 1990.

• Professor Cathy Schnieder of International Service at American University did a study and noted that in 1989, black people, representing 12-15% of all drug use in the United States, made up 41% of all arrests. That was a noted increase from 38% in 1988. White people were 47% of those in state-funded treatment centers but fewer than 10% of those committed to prison.

• People like John P. Walters have criticized the Drug War and Racism though.

CLAIM: There was support from black institutions and groups like the black caucus who deliberately exacerbated tough-on-crime.

That is correct. The fact that there were Black people who supported “getting tough on crime” is not ignored in the relevant literature establishing structural and institutional racism, and has been part of broader analyses. For illustration, in her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explicitly remarks that some members of the Congressional Black Caucus believed the harsh penalties passed with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act were needed, while others were convinced that the new legislation was biased against African Americans. She also takes the time to discuss Black support for tough-on-crime policies. The following summarizes one of her main points on the matter:

“Regardless, the reality for poor blacks trapped in ghettos remains the same: they must live in a state of perpetual insecurity and fear. It is perfectly understandable, then, that some African Americans would be complicit with the system of mass incarceration, even if they oppose, as a matter of social policy, the creation of racially isolated ghettos and the subsequent transfer of black youth from underfunded, crumbling schools to brand-new, hightech prisons. In the era of mass incarceration, poor African Americans are not given the option of great schools, community investment, and job training. Instead, they are offered police and prisons. If the only choice that is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and understandable) answer will be ‘more prisons.’”

Also see the National Research Council’s report on The Growth of Incarceration in the United States:

“On the other hand, new research also finds that some black leaders supported tougher laws, most notably in the early years of the war on drugs, while others were fierce opponents. The growing concentration of violence, drug addiction, and open-air drug markets in poor urban neighborhoods; disillusionment with government efforts to stem these developments; and widening class divisions among blacks help explain why some African American community leaders endorsed a causal story of the urban crisis that focused on individual flaws, not structural problems, and that singled out addicts and drug pushers as part of the “undeserving poor” who posed the primary threat to working- and middle-class African Americans (Fortner, 2013; Barker, 2009, p. 151; Gottschalk, forthcoming; Cohen, 1999; Dawson, 2011).”

“Other black leaders endorsed what Forman (2012) describes as an “all-of-the-above” approach, calling for tougher sanctions and aggressive law enforcement but also for greater attention and resources to address underlying social and economic conditions. According to Forman, this helps explain why African American political, religious, and other leaders in Washington, DC, the only black-majority jurisdiction that controlled its sentencing policies (after home rule was granted in 1973), supported tougher crime policy. Opposition to these policies remained muted, even after their disproportionate toll on blacks, especially young black men, became apparent. Forman (2012) attributes this stance to the stigmatizing and marginalizing effects that contact with criminal justice had on former prisoners and their families, inhibiting them from taking public positions or engaging in political debates about these policies. Black leaders, politicians, and advocacy groups clearly were not the main instigators of the shift to harsh crime policy, but at least in some instances, their actions helped foster this turn, in many cases unwittingly.”

It is a complex topic which requires adopting systems lenses. I would keep in mind that structural and institutional racism does not require Black Americans (and other racialized minorities) to be purely passive to exist, and that they exist within the system being described.

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In Other Countries

In Other Countries

Resources that go over non-USA criminal justice racism are harder to come across, but if it comes up in a conversation these might be useful.

Sweden

• Bradby et al. 19: racism in healthcare settings in Sweden (uses concept of Structural Violence)

• McEachrane 18: Makes the argument that “using the term race and considering structural racial discrimination as such and the impacts on it of European colonialism are needed for Sweden’s observance of universal human rights.” Portrays impact and identification of structural discrimination in sweden as well.

• Wolgast et al. 18: Report on racism and discrimination against the afro-swedish population (NOTE: The data compares Afro-Swedish to the rest of the populace, including other groups that have been shown to also suffer discrimination, therefore, the source indicates that the situation for Afro-Swedish may be EVEN WORSE than as shown in the source).

UK

• Ministry of Justice 20 (government source): Finds disproportionate stops by British police. The majority of stops (97%) were under section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Black stops increased from between 2017/18 and 2018/19, the national rate increased for the first time since 2009/10, from 5 to 7 stop and searches per 1,000 people, This was despite a trend of decreasing stops for black-british (the entire group).

• The Lammy Review 17: Found rates of incarceration, arrests, and discrimination in the courts systems across a variety of countries, including the U.K. One example of the results of the study include the fact that BAME were more likely to receive Prison sentences than whites even when factors such as past convictions are taken into account.

• Despite multiple police brutality incidents (Da Costa, Charles, Mubenga), the last time a British police officer was arrested concerning the death of somebody in custody was in 1969.

• Shiner et al. 18: Focuses on disproportionate stope and relations between discrimination and the Drug War in the UK.

• Hammer et al. 14: WORKER CONDITIONS, NOT RACE (although there seems to be a correlation between the poorer quality of factories and race + ethnicity, I do not have proof for this conclusion)

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4984732/

The Netherlands

• Ramos et al. 19
  • Labour market discrimination against Moroccan minorities in the Netherlands and Spain: a crossnational and cross-regional comparison
• Balkenhol et al. 16
  • The Nativist Triangle: Sexuality, Race and Religion in the Netherlands
• Silver & Danielowski 19
  • Fighting Housing Discrimination in Europe (includes Netherlands)

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Possible Solutions

Possible Solutions

Unconscious bias training, taking power from the police, and meaningfully increasing their accountability.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zQEiFrOtrV0si3o0fkXYMj1c5jxsV22TGhp9TBug_B0/edit

https://stanford.app.box.com/v/Strategies-for-Change

Implicit Bias Training/Reduction

• The Atlantic: Nordell 2017
  • Unconscious Bias Training (or Implicit Bias Training) has been shown effective, but requires people to both care enough to attend workshops to fix Bias, and to reinforce the elimination of Biased infrastructures.
• Forscher et al. 2019
  • Implicit bias can be reduced but some methods have very little impact, multiple methods of Implicit Bias Training may be necessary for best results
• Warren and Tomaskovic‐Devey 2009
  • Found that racial profiling was impacted a good ways by media and legislation - “The findings suggest that media accounts and the passage of new legislation were particularly powerful influences, which thereby reduced racial disparity in searches. Declines in the use of consent searches and an increased probability of finding contraband also were influenced by the politics of racial profiling.”

• https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

• https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=ihrc

Defunding and Downsizing

• Camden, New Jersey
  • Governing: Maciag 2014
    • “Average per officer costs were trimmed from $182,168 to $99,605, according to county figures.”
    • “Businesses are now considering moving into Camden, something unthinkable even a couple years ago.”
  • CNN: Andrew 2020
    • Formerly ‘Most Dangerous City in US’ Camden, New Jersey disbanded their Police Department, and as a result “violent crimes have dropped 42% in seven years, according to city crime data provided by the department. The crime rate has dropped from 79 per 1,000 to 44 per 1,000, the data shows.”
  • New York Post: Sheehy 2020
    • “But the force has since unionized again, and costs have grown, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Camden budgeted $68.45 million for cops last year, while Paterson — which has twice the population — spends an estimated $44.72 million a year on police.”
  • Keep in mind that if someone says “but crime rates were falling across all of New Jersey at the time”, this should still at the very least indicate that Camden’s reforms didn’t disrupt the state-wide trend from occuring in the city.
• New York Times: Bratton 2016
  • Regulations have been shown ineffective, necessary changes include modification to the police structure and improvement of police-community bonds. The emphasis of these modifications is to involve the community to prevent and address crime
• It’s Going Down: 2017
  • In order to downsize the police, community cohesion is a necessary step to that goal. This Pamphlet gives several ways to promote community cohesion that does not involve police.
  • Keep in mind that many poor, black communities may lack the necessary cohesion for something like this to be done, thus necessitating other changes or reforms be made alongside what the pamphlet suggests
• New York Times: Bazelon
  • Interview with several members of major activists in Black Lives Matter movement
    • Participants agreed that Police Unions restrict legislative power
    • Participants agree that 911 calls should expand services to include therapists and social workers which will downsize the number of police needed
• #8cantwait
  • Research Basis Document for Proposed Solutions
    • #8cantwait [Download Report]
  • “This is the largest study on this topic to date and its findings echo the findings from past research, supporting the efficacy of policies like banning shooting at people in vehicles, the requirement officers exhaust alternatives prior to using deadly force and the requirement that officers report whenever they point a firearm at people.”

Community Policing

• Peyton et al. 2019
  • ‘Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects persisted for up to 21 d[ays] and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention.’

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-014-9210-y

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2705986/

some thoughts on community policing/more casual police engagement with general populace

pros

• knowing the local cops will increase local trust in police
• more trust in police means more compliance and less use of force
• social cohesion in general could improve from this, which helps everyone, especially those in poorer areas

cons

• weakening local/irl communities, result of social media and etc, could minimize the impact or ability of police to build relationships with local people
• corruption, police could make unfair deals with local people who they know well and essentially lead to favoritism by police

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Additional Studies

Additional Studies

• According to a 2014 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, black and Latino defendants in New York City were more likely to be detained before trial for comparable crimes. They were also more likely to have charges dismissed. The study didn’t look at this, but that may have been because they were more likely to be wrongly arrested in the first place. The study found that race played a role at nearly every step in the process, from arrest to detention to setting bail to sentencing.

• A 2011 study of bail in five large U.S. counties found that blacks received $7,000 higher bail than whites for violent crimes, $13,000 higher for drug crimes and $10,000 higher for crimes related to public order. These disparities were calculated after adjusting for the seriousness of the crime, criminal history and other variables.

• A 2013 review of 50 years of studies on racial disparities in bail practices found that black people are subject to pretrial detention more frequently, and have bail set at higher amounts, than white people who have similar criminal histories and are facing similar charges. Studies documented this disparity in state and federal cases as well as juvenile justice proceedings, and in all regions of the country.

• In 2014, the Urban Institute looked at probation offices in four locations across the country: New York City; Multnomah County, Ore.; Dallas County, Tex.; and Iowa’s Sixth Judicial District. After adjusting for criminal history, seriousness of the crime and other factors, the study found that black people were 18 to 39 percent more likely than white people to have their probation revoked.

• About 16 percent of sexual assaults of white women are committed by black men, but half of the exonerations for sexual assault involve cases in which an eyewitness wrongly identified a black man for the rape of a white woman.

• A 2016 report from the Black Alliance for Just Immigration found that black immigrants were significantly more likely to be deported than immigrants of other races.

• A national study of misdemeanor arrests published in the Boston University Law Review found that the “black arrest rate is at least twice as high as the white arrest rate for disorderly conduct, drug possession, simple assault, theft, vagrancy, and vandalism. The black arrest rate for prostitution is almost five times higher than the white arrest rate, and the black arrest rate for gambling is almost ten times higher.”

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/cico.12388 “We find that complaints by black and Latino citizens and against white officers are less likely to be sustained.”

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Addressing Reactionary/Anti-BLM Claims

Addressing Reactionary/Anti-BLM Claims

Credit goes where it’s due, see more of this good stuff in this doc and from this person. A detailed 13/50 debunk can be found here.

1. “Black Lives Matter? No, All Lives Matter.”

The typical responses to this are already well-known and basically impenetrable. For example:

“Save the rainforests.”

“No… save all forests.”

Clearly, forests in general are important. But rainforests face unique circumstances that are not applicable to other types of forests. In other words, it is useful to be precise about specific problems facing specific communities.

As a response to the claim that “black lives matter,” the claim that “all lives matter” violates pragmatic appropriateness criteria: it confuses listeners about the issue (Maxim of Quality); it is, at best, irrelevant to the topic-at-hand (Maxim of Relation): and it introduces ambiguity and obscurity into the discussion (Maxim of Manner). It is not false that all lives matter, but so what? Our goal in speaking and writing is not merely to say all and only true things; we’re not simply computers that check the truth of a sentence and then spit out that sentence if it passes the truth-test. The broad context of speech is very important to the appropriateness of that speech, and “all lives matter” at this moment, in this country, as a response to the claim that “black lives matter” fails the relevant pragmatic tests. So as the poster says, at this moment, in this country: all lives can’t matter until black lives matter.

Shorter Version:

It is not false that black lives matter. It is also not false that all lives matter. Saying that black lives matter is not saying that only black lives matter. And if all lives matter, then black lives, which are a proper subset of all lives, also matter. So why do some people respond to the claim that “black lives matter” by saying that “all lives matter,” and why do people told that “all lives matter” after they have said that “black lives matter” take the claim that “all lives matter” to be a negation of or a challenge to the claim that “black lives matter”? The central issue is one that lies in the linguistic distinction between what’s known as “semantic content” and “pragmatic content.” In brief, the “all lives matter” crowd is (intentionally or unintentionally violating criteria of pragmatic appropriateness and then defending that violation by appealing to unviolated criteria of semantic appropriateness.

2. “BLM is a terrorist organization.”

Black Lives Matter is not a terrorist organization nor a terrorist movement, and no responsible source would describe it as such.

1. The State Department keeps a list of foreign groups that have been formally designated terrorist organizations. Black Lives Matter, a domestic organization, is not on it.
2. There is no legal process for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations.
3. Black Lives Matter is not listed as a perpetrator group in a global database of nearly 200,000 terrorism incidents.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/30/facebook-posts/black-lives-matter-not-terrorist-organization/

3. “BLM protests are violent/destructive.”

• Only 6 to 7% of BLM protests turned violent or destructive, and that was largely due to white supremacists, police, and counter protesters.
  • 38 of the protests that were considered violent were the toppling of confederate statues.
  • There were 50 car ramming attacks of people hating BLM so much they wanted to run their cars into people.
  • Over 100 of the events in which non-state actors engaged in the demonstrations, including the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Boogaloo Boys.
  • In 30 of the events, counter protesters engaged with BLM protesters.
  • 90 of the events, militarized police actually instigated the violence.
  • https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/
  • https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN26031F
  • https://www.salon.com/2020/07/29/minneapolis-umbrella-man-is-white-supremacist-who-tried-to-incite-riot-after-floyd-killing-police/
  • https://m.startribune.com/questions-remain-about-attacks-reportedly-by-white-supremacists-during-george-floyd-riots/572312312/
  • https://www.wsls.com/news/virginia/2020/07/27/police-richmond-riots-instigated-by-white-supremacists-disguised-as-black-lives-matter/?outputType=amp
  • https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynerash/2020/06/17/boogaloo-movement-tied-to-murder-violence-and-disinformation-during-protests/amp/
  • https://www.mprnews.org/amp/story/2020/07/28/warrant-white-supremacist-instigated-looting-at-george-floyd-protest-in-minneapolis
  • https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-ag-sue-nypd-handling-black-lives-matter/story?id=75251212
  • https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867532070/trumps-unannounced-church-visit-angers-church-officials
  • https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/16/us/george-floyd-protests-police-tear-gas.html
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/opinion/sunday/police-riots.amp.html
  • https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/3211421001
  • https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/08/vehicle-ramming-attacks-66-us-since-may-27/5397700002/
  • Approximately 94% of all pro-BLM demonstrations have been peaceful, with 6% involving reports of violence, clashes with police, vandalism, looting, or other destructive activity.
    • In the remaining 6%, it is not clear who instigated the violent or destructive activity. While some cases of violence or looting have been provoked by demonstrators, other events have escalated as a result of aggressive government action, intervention from right-wing groups or individual assailants, and car-ramming attacks.
  • In contrast, demonstrations involving right-wing militias or militant social movements have turned violent or destructive over twice as often, or nearly 14% of the time.
  • Authorities are three times more likely to intervene in pro-BLM demonstrations than they are in other demonstrations.
    • When intervening, they are more likely to use force against pro-BLM demonstrators: 52% of the time, compared to 26% of the time against all other demonstrators.
  • These trends hold whether demonstrations have remained peaceful or not: authorities have engaged non-violent protests associated with BLM more than twice as often as other types of non-violent protests.
    • When intervening, authorities have used force 37% of the time against peaceful pro-BLM protesters, compared to under 20% of the time against other peaceful protesters.
  • At least 38 distinct, named far-right groups have engaged directly with pro-BLM demonstrators.
    • Approximately 26% of these demonstrations have turned violent or destructive.
  • The ‘Back the Blue’ movement has played a key role in the right-wing response to BLM, organizing counter-demonstrations as well as holding independent rallies in support of the police.
    • Nearly two-thirds of all ‘Back the Blue’ demonstrations are one-sided events, with no intervention by authorities. The lack of government engagement in pro-police demonstrations underlines a vast discrepancy in police response: 2% of pro-police demonstrations have been met with law enforcement intervention, relative to over 9% of pro-BLM demonstrations.
  • Car rammings are eight times more common at demonstrations associated with the BLM movement than at other types of demonstrations, with incidents reported at nearly 1% of all BLM-related events.
  • The vast majority — 73% — of all BLM-related demonstrations that faced car-ramming attacks were peaceful.
  • https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ACLED_Report_A-Year-of-Racial-Justice-Protests_May2021.pdf

4. “What About Black-on-Black Crime?”

The main purpose of this argument is to dismiss the significance of police killings. You might hear this argument in its most common form: “If Black Lives Matter, you should support the police because of all the Black-on-Black crime.” This is a racist dog whistle. To state that Black-on-Black crime alone is a problem paints a misleading picture that Black people are slaughtering their own in the streets, necessitating the role of the police to restore order.

There are three main problems with this argument:

1. It’s a red herring/tu quoque. There is no reason why we shouldn’t believe that both are bad. We can both condemn police brutality and misconduct while condemning murders, theft, and etc. by the civilian population. Civilians can and will commit crimes, including murder. Police are supposed to uphold the law, and as such should be held to a higher standard when they make mistakes or commit crimes.
2. The reason why there is Black-on-Black crime is the same reason why there is a lot of White-on-White crime; the vast majority of crime occurs within racial groups. This is a byproduct of systemic racism since poverty, proximity, urbanity, etc cause crime.
3. This argument frames the advocacy of BLM (no police brutality) and the suppression of Black-on-Black crime as a trade-off. There is no reason to believe that police murdering Black people would lower Black-on-Black crime. This trade-off makes absolutely no sense.

The comparison is apples and oranges. If a black person kills a black person, they are going to jail. When a police officer kills an unarmed black person, it is usually done with impunity. The cop gets paid leave and comes back free. A police officer is an agent of the state, a public servant, a position which necessitates a higher standard of accountability to the public than a civilian.

5. “BLM wants to disrupt the nuclear family.”

This doesn’t fully represent what the Black Lives Matter website says about families. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” it says on the page titled “What we believe.” It also says “We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.”

• “I don’t think there’s any reasonable basis to claim” that the group’s website “is promoting an actual reduction in the proportion of people actually living in a Western nuclear family structure — but rather, to imagine ‘successful’ families as more inclusive than this particular vision of family,” - Davin L. Phoenix, a University of California, Irvine, political scientist who studies Black politics. Phoenix said that the statement calling for “disruption” is most accurately interpreted as disrupting agendas that give benefits to people with middle-class family structures over those without. For example, zoning laws that prioritize single-family housing or tax credits for married homeowners leave out people who are single or rent their home.”It is a call to disrupt the notion that the nuclear family structure is the only way to ensure neighborhood stability and vitality, and to affirm that neighborhoods that contain a high volume of non-traditional family structures (e.g. households with a single parent or grandparents / other familial figures as primary caregivers for kids) are just as capable of — and just as deserving of — policies and practices that contribute to neighborhood stability and vitality,” - Phoenix.

• Black Lives Matter has essentially said the nuclear family is untenable and that extended families provide the necessary support to take care of one another. - Nadia Brown, a political science and African American studies professor at Purdue University. “For example, if both parents work outside the home and a child gets sick, who will care for the child while also earning an income? Having a grandparent or another adult in the home who assists with care responsibilities lessens the burdens on the parents to both work and care for the children.”

• BLM “is focused on improving life outcomes and opportunities for Black-identifying people in the United States, regardless of sexual orientation,” - Georgetown University government professor Jamil Scott, whose specialties include race and ethnicity in politics. “Across online materials that I’ve encountered, associated with Black Lives Matters and its chapters, I’ve never seen any statements that indicate Black Lives Matter is calling for the destruction of the nuclear family.” https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/aug/28/ask-politifact-does-black-lives-matter-aim-destroy/

6. “BLM money just goes to democrat candidates.”

Black Lives Matter money goes to ActBlue which is a nonprofit technology organization that provides a platform for people to contribute to Democratic campaigns and causes. Black Lives Matter and Democratic presidential candidates both use the platform to fundraise. ActBlue does not pocket donations that are facilitated by its platform — it ferries the money along to the organizations requesting it. It’s similar to a platform called WinRed, which facilitates fundraising for Republican candidates.

• https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/12/ryan-fournier/conservative-pundits-share-false-claim-about-black/

• https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/donations-to-black-lives-matter-group-dont-go-to-dnc/

• https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-9043930562

7. “More White people die from the police than Black people.”

To say more White people are killed by police completely ignores marginal distribution, conditional distribution, and bayesian data analysis.

1. Despite making 13% of the population, Black people were the victims of more than 28% of police killings. They are 2.5 times more likely to be killed in general. The reason why more white people are killed is because white people make up the larger population.
2. Northeastern professor Matt Miller ran a statistical analysis, categorizing police violence into various categories (e.g. victim unarmed, victim possessed a knife, victim possessed a gun). He found that, in every subcategory of police violence, Black people were killed at a significantly higher rate. Among those who were unarmed and appeared to show no objective threat to police, nearly 2/3 of those killed were Black.

8. “George Floyd died of a drug overdose.”

Mr. Floyd had “19 nanograms per milliliter of methamphetamine and 2.9 nanograms per milliliter of THC, the major psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Those numbers suggest he hadn’t used them in at least several hours, maybe a day.” Floyd “also had 11 nanograms of fentanyl in his blood. That number, in and of itself, doesn’t tell us much. Immediately after person dies, the blood concentration of fentanyl increases significantly, so knowing only the post-mortem amount does not tell us about Mr. Floyd’s level of intoxication before his death.” “The findings of the two autopsy reports - one from the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office and the other from a medical examiner hired by Mr. Floyd’s family classified the manner of Mr. Floyd’s death as homicide.”

9. “George Floyd beat women and held guns to their pregnant bellies.”

The Associated Press detailed that in 2007, Floyd was involved in an aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, in which he and five other suspects forced their way into a woman’s apartment. Floyd was identified as the suspect that pushed a pistol against the abdomen of the woman, who was identified in other reports as Aracely Henriquez. He pleaded guilty to the crime in 2009 and served five years in prison before his release in 2013. However, there is no evidence that Henriquez was pregnant at the time of the robbery, according to court documents. The documents further state that after Floyd put the gun to her abdomen, he went on to search the house while another suspect guarded her. It was this suspect that beat Henriquez, not Floyd. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/08/facebook-posts/evidence-shows-george-floyds-death-was-not-result-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jun/16/instagram-posts/no-photo-doesnt-show-woman-george-floyd-allegedly-/

Regardless of the specific details at play, people only bring up this point as a red herring. Floyd’s involvement in the robbery, although morally reprehensible, did not justify Derek Chauvin killing Floyd over a decade later, especially as Floyd had already served his time in prison for the robbery. The reason George Floyd is relevant to the national conversation at all is because he was murdered by Derek Chauvin, and the immediate situation around his murder is completely unrelated to the robbery in 2007. The point here is that Floyd’s robbery involvement in 2007 does NOT justify the extrajudicial police brutality that he faced in 2020, nor does it justify any other instances of police brutality/discrimination against black people.

10. “Not all cops are bastards” (AKA “a few bad apples”)

ACAB is a statement on how every individual cop is ultimately complicit in the atrocities of police. If you stand rank-and-file with other officers and reluctantly watch as your friend launches tear gas into a crowd of peaceful protesters, you are a bastard. As the saying goes, if there are 10 bad cops in a police force of a 1000 “good cops” but the bad cops aren’t held accountable, then there are just 1000 bad cops.

According to Roberta Johnson’s paper on Whistleblowing and the Police, “Penalties for whistleblowers can be harsh. ‘The full force of the agency, formal and informal, is brought to bear on the ‘snitcher.’ Rats are scorned, shunned, excluded, condemned, harassed, and almost invariably, cast out. Noback-up for them. They literally find cheese in their lockers.’” Whistleblowers end up on “end up on a ‘hit list’ that can result in unwanted transfers, a dock in pay, unfavorable assignments and other retaliatory measures. Case after case offers evidence of harsh retaliation.”

The failure of police to reform itself by firing and cracking down on whistleblowers indicates that even if a good person enters the police force, they will either be booted out for trying to snitch on their peers or will be peer-pressured to be complicit. If an individual cannot avoid complicity in the misconduct of operations, the only ethical option is to quit.

Cops occupy a similar space to soldiers who fight on the immoral side of a war. For example, every soldier who voluntarily served in the Confederate military was complicit in fighting for slavery. Every person who served the Confederacy was ultimately complicit in a war crime, whether through serving in combat or logistics. I bet that there were some really kind and well-intentioned Confederate soldiers who wanted to honorably serve their state or defend their homes. At the end of the day, their intentions do not matter because they fought for a bastard cause. In a similar vein, the role of police in society is to use violence and intimidation to maintain the current order, whether through stop and frisk, evicting families during a pandemic, or suppressing what are largely peaceful protests with tear gas and rubber bullets. The current order is unjust and that’s why ACAB.

Moving into the empirical realm, the vast majority of police officers have either committed, or covered up, at least one instance of police misconduct. According to a study from the US Department of Justice (based on survey data from police officers themselves):

• 84% of police witnessed fellow officers using more force than necessary.
• 61% of cops “do not always report even serious criminal violations that involve the abuse of authority by fellow officers.”
• 52% of cops believed that “It is not unusual for officers to ignore improper conduct by their fellow officers.”
• A strong majority of cops allow their fellow officers to get away with misconduct, and believe that others do it as well. This is indicative of a culture of abuse within police departments
• The use of force by police is very often improper; according to the DOJ, “improper force was used in 38 percent of encounters that involved force.” More than one-third of all police uses of force are “improper,” and those are just the ones that we know about!

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/clearances

• These are the 2017 crime clearance rates for US law enforcement officials, from data released voluntarily by police departments
• There are three conditions that must be met for a crime to be cleared. arrest, charges pressed, and the case is turned over to prosecution. OR it can be cleared by exceptional means, the conditions of which include the following. Identified offender, sufficient evidence for arrest, and some uncontrollable circumstance that prevented the arrest, charging and prosecution of an offender.
• Given these caveats, these are the clearance rates for law enforcement
  • Murder and non-negligent manslaughter 61.7%
  • Rape 34.5%
  • Robbery 29.7
  • Aggravated assault 53.3%
  • Burglary 13.5%
  • Larceny-theft 19.2%
  • Motor vehicle theft 13.7%
• These clearance rates show that law enforcement is not only unduly violent, but they also fail to put serious offenders behind bars. They are violating the human rights of the citizenry and still can’t find criminals.

11. “A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be shot by a black man, than an unarmed black man is to be shot by a cop.”

This statistic is both misleading and a red herring. It might seem scary at first, until you realize that unarmed civilians obviously outnumber cops for all races. The exact same method could be applied to white men rather than black men and you’d get 77x instead of 18.5x, but we can probably all recognize that white people aren’t some big threat to police - and we should recognize the same regarding blacks. Regardless, this statistic does nothing to help point out problems with the black community or the sort, and only serves to justify police killings of black people.

12. “Police have a very dangerous job, which justifies them being able to use force even in cases when it’s unjustified.”

Law enforcement is not a particularly dangerous profession. According to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, delivery and truck drivers are about twice as likely to die on the job compared to police. Fishers and logging workers are about ten times as likely to die at work as are police officers.

In addition, according to figures from the FBI, many cops killed on the job die from accidents (such as traffic fatalities), not from homicide. The murder rate for police (3 per 100,000) is significantly lower than that for the general population (5 per 100,000). Keep in mind though that police are more likely than other jobs to die from a shooting, but this level of danger isn’t reflected in overall death stats for the job.

On top of this, the most dangerous part of the polices’ job, dealing with violent crime, is what people usually think of when they bring up how dangerous the job is; however, dealing with any violent crimes only makes up about 4% of their overall duties (so around an hour and a half per week assuming a 40 hour work week).

13. ” Less than 1% of all police contact with civilians results in police brutality or death by a cop.”

Specifically, 5.2% of African Americans were likely to experience threat or excessive force from police. That’s compared to 2.4% for White Americans. Let’s also take into account that 3.1% of the traffic stops against black drivers, police did not have a legitimate reason to stop them. That’s comparable to the 1.8% of white traffic stops for zero legitimate reason (also bringing up the “black on black” crime statistic is irrelevant because these are illegitimate reasons.) Neglecting the fact that 40% of families experience domestic violence from police. Government sources project that nearly 1 in 4.7 officers have committed police brutality in their lifetimes (~20%). UsaToday found police misconduct in 85,000 cops nationwide comparable to the 800,000 cops there are in the nation (~10%). For excessive force, African Americans are more likely to have statistics that back them. The majority of those who experience force, 84% perceive it to be excessive as did those who were pushed, grabbed, hit, or kicked. What is perceived as excessive force? An unjust reaction to a call. For example, 89.5% of the population believed the police behaved respectfully. Only 59.5% think that they improved the situation.

• Police Interactions
  • “Police interactions” and “police contact” aren’t arguments. “Police interactions” can be “peaceful”, however let’s not forget that police interactions can range from shooting a guy in the back of the head to saying “hi” to someone. Police interactions are always going to be high because a police interaction can just be greeting a cop. What is a “contact”? A domestic violence call? A traffic stop? In any case, making such a huge claim about a lack of racial bias among police owes some clarity and specificity. More importantly, the bigger problem here, of course, is that so many interactions between black people and the police simply aren’t reported and never make the news. The validity of an interaction isn’t expressed or valid and police interactions are going to be endless so it causes inflation of numbers.
• Arrests
  • Arrests are skewed. A 2 year study of 3 middle of the road police departments. Main take is that “The results reveal 893 UOF incidents, representing a UOF rate of 0.086% of 1,041,737 calls for service (1 in 1167) and 0.78% of 114,064 criminal arrests (1 in 128).” (UOF = Use of force.) That means 10 million arrests is about 100 million calls for service. Extrapolating the math puts us at roughly 78,125 uses of force during arrests. Interesting side note, 76% of hospitalizations were unrelated to the use of force of the officers. https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=273714
• Lightning comparison
  • Anybody of any race can get hit by lightning. It is more likely that 320 million people would get hit by lightning, more than 13% of the population getting killed by police. The numbers are still disproportionate because more black people get killed by police per capita than the people in the US get struck by lightning. Also the lighting doesn’t care who it strikes. It doesn’t have feelings. It doesn’t make decisions. The lightning didn’t have 6 months of training.

---

Addressing Specific Reactionary Studies

Addressing Specific Reactionary Studies

1. Fryer 2016 (sometimes cited as this NYT article)

• Harvard study used to assert that police don’t discriminate against black people
• Fryer interprets his data too broadly given its scope, only having looked at a few cities
• Critique by another fellow at Harvard: “It is a failure of journalism that the New York Times heavily promoted this study without seeking critical perspectives from experts in the field. Fryer makes basic methodological errors, overstates the quality of his results, and casually uses the term “racial bias” in a way that is nearly guaranteed to be misinterpreted by anyone who isn’t an economist.”
• This study uses an incorrect model to analyze use of force by police, and several counter-studies have been conducted to refute this.

  • [Racial/Ethnic Disparities in the Use of Lethal Force by US Police, 2010–2014

    AJPH

    Vol. 107 Issue 2](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303575)

• A different conclusion is apparent when a population-level perspective is taken. That approach aims to identify all such deaths in a population and reflects not only the outcomes of police encounters, the focus of Fryer’s investigation,1 but also the likelihood of police encounters. That difference matters.
  • Explaining the Disparity in Results Across Studies Assessing Racial Disparity in Police Use of Force: A Research Note
• Seven studies discussing police bias and the variations in their findings were analyzed.
• These variations in findings could reflect variation in the actual phenomenon across agencies and/or geographic areas or could reflect different research methods used to study the same phenomenon.
  • Fryer utilizes several datasets to analyze Police Use of Force:
• A close look at the coding does not answer the concerning question raised by these variable definitions: Why are officers attacking when only defensive resistance is being used by the subject? These definitions raise questions about the validity of the study.
• Fryer summarizes his findings by reporting that he found racial differences in incidents involving non-lethal force, but no racial differences in officer-involved shootings […] One cannot compare less-lethal force used within NYC stop and frisk encounters to Houston OIS’s and draw conclusions about how less lethal force and lethal force might be similar or different in terms of racial bias.
• This source has many other critiques of Fryers study…
  • Resolution of apparent paradoxes in the race-specific frequency of use-of-force by police
• Argues that the indication that there are no racial disparities in officer involved shootings are explainable are explainable under a generative model. The paper asserts that this model is inaccurate, and that Population-level measures of use-of-force by police are more robust indicators of the overall severity of racial disparities than encounter-conditional measures—since the later neglect the differential morbidity and mortality arising from differential encounter rates.
• In more technical terms, statistical assessments of racial disparities conditioned on problematic intermediate variables, such as encounters, which might themselves be a causal outcome of racial bias, can produce misleading inferences.
  • More critiques:
    • https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/710976
    • https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d56b/73bb7e1b72a8436e571761078a1be8ebc227.pdf

2. PNAS: Johnson et al. 2019

• Used to assert to police don’t discriminate against black people - “We find no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.”
• The study rests on the erroneous assumption that police encounter minorities and whites at the same rate and that if police have a higher threshold for stopping whites who engage in suspicious behavior than blacks, then the data on police shootings masks the discrimination.
• Good briefs on flaws: https://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/news/item/cautionary-tale-about-measuring-racial-bias-policing
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/15/police-shooting-study-retracted/
• The people who wrote the study later said the study’s data can’t be used to make statements on police racial bias, and criticized others for using the study to do just that: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/31/18135
  • The misuse of the study got so bad the authors chose to request their own study be retracted. They further clarified this was not due to something like mob pressure, but solely due to the misuse of their study, which could have been avoided had they better explained the implications of the study.
• Big brain critiques I cannot comprehend in the middle of the night:
  • https://www.pnas.org/content/117/3/1261
  • https://www.pnas.org/content/117/3/1263
  • https://replicationindex.com/2019/10/13/police-officers-are-not-six-times-more-likely-to-shoot-white-civilians-than-black-civilians-a-coding-error-in-johnson-et-al-2019/

3. Cesario et al. 2018

• Used to argue that there’s no racial bias in police shootings, or even that there’s an anti-white bias in such
• https://replicationindex.com/2019/10/20/hidden-evidence-in-racial-bias-research-by-cesario-and-johnson/
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550620916071
  • Cesario 2021 replies to Ross however he doesn’t really make an argument. In fact Ross and Cesario more or less agree. Cesario just says that racial differences in encounter rates can differ between black and white unarmed non criminals. However using this encounter denominator is just guilty of collider bias. If there’s bias in who gets stopped in the first place, then looking at discrepancies in the resulting interactions won’t give you the full picture.

4. James et al. 2016

• Used to argue police are less hesitant to kill black people and that the biases should correlate with the real world.
• But the county of officers in which the study took place also disproportionately kills African Americans, 2% of pop. but ~15% of all police shootings are deaths. The study was a simulation and didn’t take actual data from police. It lacks ecological validity. That is, when you observe people their behavior tends to change (this is called the Hawthorne effect. Essentially it means that because the police are being watched and they know they are being researched they may alter their behavior to be consistent with how they want to be viewed.). Considering that this paper’s findings are inconsistent with real world statistics, I would say that it is not representative of real cop behavior. A more accurate Harvard study found that black people are actually more than 3 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter. Other studies have shown black people experience police use of force. In my opinion, I’m not sure what this study is attempting to prove? In an argument on police racism I would never make a claim for something that is so hard to prove with little evidence. This study also has many limitations in its way of acting it out; this study exists solely in the confines of research labs. It is an empirical fact that unarmed black men are killed at a higher rate than white men per capita and by proportion. The speed at which they are killed is an irrelevant variable to me.
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12289

5. Correll et al. 2014

• Used to argue there’s no racial bias in police shootings.
• This is a simulation and doesn’t take actual data from police meaning it lacks ecological validity. That is, when you observe people their behavior tends to change (this is called the Hawthorne effect. Essentially it means that because the police are being watched and they know they are being researched they may alter their behavior to be consistent with how they want to be viewed.). Considering that this paper’s findings are inconsistent with real world statistics, I would say that it is not representative of real cop behavior. They still find that police are still susceptible to reaction time biases due to implicit or explicit knowledge or endorsement of stereotypes about Black people.

6. Mentch et al. 2020

• Used to argue that after accounting for arrest rates, there is less disparity in police shootings.

7. Weistburst et al. 2019

• Used to argue black people were not over-represented among those killed by the Dallas police department relative to their arrest rates in Dallas.
• https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26774/w26774.pdf

8. “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism”WSJ piece by Heather Mac Donald

• Popular media op-ed used to argue systemic racism in police is a myth.
• Thorough rebuttal: https://medium.com/@mikeskessler/the-problems-with-the-wall-street-journals-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-op-ed-cab41e5ee2ec
• Many pieces of the op-ed have already been refuted in the Source Library. See elsewhere on this page for rebuttals to their Fryer and Johnson study references, as well as a rebuttal to the 18.5 statistic and the ‘black-on-black crime’ talking point. Once you get past those, the op-ed just holds a lot less weight.

9. Darolia et al. 2015

• Used to show that there is no racial bias in employment
• BAD DATA: Uses Chloe and Ryan as first names for the black names, which, according to an analysis of 2 million Florida school children referenced in this Chicago Tribune article are 89% and 90% white names respectively
  • This means that the ‘black names’ used were Chloe Washington and Ryan Jefferson, while the ‘white names’ were Megan Anderson or Bryan Thompson, which I feel you couldn’t tell the difference between races.
• It’s also a cherry picked study. A meta analysis that looked at 24 studies looking at racial differences in hiring from 1989 to 2016 found not only is there a very significant gap between black and white callbacks (36%), there also hasn’t been a significant change during that time. Applicant education, applicant gender, study method, occupational groups, and local labor market conditions were all adjusted for, and there was still no significant change.

10. Tootell et al. 1992

• Used to argue the disparity in denial rates in mortgage lending was wholly attributed to other factors.
• It actually says “The results of this study indicate that minority applicants, on average, do have greater debt burdens, higher loan-to-value ratios, and weaker credit histories and they are less likely to buy single-family homes than white applicants, and that these disadvantages do account for a large portion of the difference in denial rates, reducing the disparity between minority and white denials from the originally reported ratio of 2.7 to 1 to roughly 1.6 to 1. But these factors do not wholly eliminate the disparity, since the adjusted ratio implies that even after controlling for financial, employment, and neighborhood characteristics, black and Hispanic mortgage applicants in the Boston metropolitan area are roughly 60 percent more likely to be turned down than whites. This discrepancy means that minority applicants with the same economic and property characteristics as white applicants would experience a denial rate of 17 percent rather than the actual white denial rate of 11 percent. Thus, in the end, a statistically significant gap remains, which is associated with race.”

11. Pratt 1998

• Used to argue that the racial gap in sentencing is statistically insignificant.
• Pratt says “see Zatz, 1987). According to the above analysis, the estimated effect size of race on sentencing decisions does not approach the magnitude of those associated with the legally relevant variables (primarily the seriousness of the offense). At this level of aggregation, however, the race effect is diluted by differences in the operationalization techniques by various researchers. Isolating the methodological differences in racial classification approaches illustrates how the effect of race on sentencing outcomes may be concealed. Given this condition, it then becomes necessary.” So apparently the whole point of Pratt is that legal considerations are relevant to sentencing, but the disparity that still remains represents thousands of people treated unfairly by the system.

• Pratt 1998 seems ineligible because of no empirical analyses. Pratt says the race variable is statistically insignificant when controlling for offense severity however he only analyzed data from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but crime decreased in the 90s. So this paper is irrelevant.

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-005-7362-7
  • Mitchell 2005 even addresses Pratt by doing a meta-analysis and finds race to be statistically significant.
  • First, unlike Pratt (1998), Mitchell reviews published and unpublished studies.
  • Second, Pratt’s research excluded discrete sentencing outcomes (e.g., incarceration decisions); in contrast, Mitchell synthesizes both continuous and discrete sentencing outcomes.
  • Third, and most importantly, the focus of Mitchell is on explaining why the findings of sentencing research vary so dramatically; an issue neglected in Pratt (1998).

12. Beaver et al. 2013

• Used to argue Verbal IQ accounts for the racial gap in sentencing and arrests.
• The fundamental problem with Beaver 2013 is that the analysis was underpowered. The paper says based on NHST results that it finds no evidence of racial discrimination, but this is a type II error. Beaver et al (2013), only used a subsample of African American and White males and did not include any measures of disadvantage status. Beaver et al (2013) limited their study to comparisons between White and Black males. Race categories that do not include Hispanics can mask disparities between groups by inflating arrest and incarceration proportions among Whites and deflating the proportions among Black people. Expanding the race category to include Hispanics will avoid this. Prior research has clearly demonstrated the connection between criminal offending and socioeconomics and these variables may also be connected to criminal justice outcomes. Additionally their results aren’t aren’t as reliable because they use negative binomial regression. By using an extra parameter, their precision is decreased.
• Indirect rebuttal: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10560-019-00618-7

13. Evans and Owens 2007

• The problem with this study is it’s methodology with instrumental variables. In an effort to identify the relationship, they instrumented police levels with what they called ‘‘paid officers granted”. Paid officers granted was modeled as the sum of two federal community policing grant awards to local law enforcement agencies: (1) Universal Hiring Program (UHP) grants and (2) Distressed Neighborhood Program (DNP) grants. Their equation used to create the paid officers grant variable was as follows: ‘‘paid officers granted = 0.75 * UHP hires + DNP hires”. First-stage regressions revealed strong associations between lagged paid officers granted and current-year police levels. That is, COPS grants significantly increased the sizes of the police departments included in their sample, although not to the degree the authors expected. Their approach to instrumenting police levels is based on the simple premise that hiring grants boost the size of police forces. Hiring is also unlikely to directly affect crime, except through police levels. The possibility remains, however, that some omitted variable is associated with hiring grants and crime (an example may be ‘‘progressiveness” in fact lots of variables are associated with the crime decrease in the 90s that they omitted). Additionally since they used a Just-Identified model, they couldn’t test for instrument validity nor relevance like an over-identified model could. Granted they did attempt to test for instrument relevance in table 4:

• However there’s no specification is the result is statistically significant in the first stage regression? Even then
• significance tests alone are not sufficient. This is because when instruments are only weakly correlated with the endogenous regressor, IV estimates of parameters will be biased in the same direction as OLS and estimated standard error will be unreliable. Specifically, standard errors will be too small and the null will be rejected too often. Staiger and Stock recommend conducting an F-test on the instruments in the first-stage regression; an F-statistic of at least 10, in their view, is indicative of relevance. Of course, if the first-stage regression indicates one instrument is irrelevant (i.e., not individually significant) the researcher should consider dropping the instrument as efficiency is not improved by its use. This study did not make use of that in fact their testing and results of instrument relevance seem poor ngl. They also didn’t properly test if not, didn’t test, for instrument validity. What they did was show no significant association between pre-COPS crime and paid officers granted. However this is invalid because (1) this approach may be limited without introducing controls for current crime and (2) this is not a formal test of instrument validity. In order to assess instrument validity, a model must be over-identified. Evans and Owens has only one instrument so their model is just-identified and the validity of the instruments cannot be tested. Evans and Owens combined two hiring grant programs (UHP and DNP) into a single measure of paid officers granted, again yielding a just-identified model yielding invalid instruments.
• https://paperhub.ir/dl4.php?doi=10.1177/0032258x15612702&key=phx7RLw73ufiw
  • This meta analysis, which analyzed Evans and Owens along with other studies, found that although there is a small, inverse association between police levels and overall index crime, when this relationship is examined across individual crime types, the effect decreases in magnitude, loses statistical significance and, in some cases, changes direction.