06-01-2018, 01:06 PM
(06-01-2018, 12:48 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: While I get what you're saying here, it is my understanding based on the work of Chris Uggen, that while people of color are more likely to be searched when pulled over for a traffic stop, white people are more likely to have illegal items in their possession. What this points to is that there may (I'm saying may because assigning motive is very difficult with these sorts of things) be something more at play than basing it more on suspicious activity and race may play a greater role than many believe, including the officers themselves.
We have been led to believe for a long time that people of color, black men specifically, are more likely to be criminals. They are arrested, charged, and incarcerated at higher rates for longer sentences than other demographic groups. But the ethnographic data collected points to them not committing crimes at a rate any higher than white men, for instance.
This is one of the issues I have with the idea of "community policing" or other programs founded on the broken windows principles. There is a level of subjectivity there that is very easy to abuse and cause inequity in our application of the criminal justice system. I just wish we had a good way to really fix it, because that is difficult. As you say, LEOs are human beings and they will have the same flaws as anyone else. Same for prosecutors and judges. I don't harbor the notion that we will ever solve this issue 100%, I just wish we could have productive conversations about it.
The Census Bureau issues a crime report based on polling called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). So it is not based on arrest records influenced by police bias. It shows that blacks are more likely to commit crimes against people and/or property.
But studies of drug use show that pretty much the same percentage of white people and black people use illegal drugs. So it is hard to explain why blacks are arrested and sentenced longer (even taking into account criminal history) than blacks.
There is clearly a bias in the system all the way from police through prosecutors, judges, and even jurors. And most of it is based on the idea that blacks and other minorities are more likely to be criminals.
