Stay Woke. Candis Watts Smith
residents made up close to 90 percent of people stopped.” Of these stops, 88 percent were innocent civilians. The NYCLU also found that “even in neighborhoods that are predominantly white, black and Latino New Yorkers face the disproportionate brunt. For example, in 2011, black and Latino New Yorkers made up 24 percent of the population in Park Slope, but 79 percent of stops.”18 Overall, New York Police Department (NYPD) officers stopped and frisked more young Black men than the number who actually lived in the city!19 What this suggests is that police are more likely to believe that Black people (and men especially) are viewed as suspicious even though police often fail to produce evidence of wrongdoing during these stops.
Stop-and-frisk policies are not enforced everywhere, but traffic stops are ubiquitous. The political scientist Frank Baumgartner and a team of researchers have collected nearly thirteen million data points of police traffic stops in North Carolina. They find that young, Black and Latino men are not only more likely to be pulled over than are all other racial and gender groups for all sorts of reasons (e.g., seat belts, speed limit, stop lights/signs, vehicle regulation, and equipment issues) but are also more likely to be searched and arrested. Blacks are 80 percent more likely to be searched after a speed violation than are whites; Latinos are 174 percent more likely than whites are to be searched for the same purpose. For seat-belt violations, Blacks are 223 percent and Latinos are 106 percent more likely than whites are to be searched.20 In a study of fifty-five million police stops for over six hundred police agencies across the nation—including North Carolina, Maryland, Connecticut, Vermont, Florida, and Texas—the team of researchers unveiled significant and clear patterns of racial profiling and racially discriminatory policing; they even found that police across states are more likely to stop Blacks than they are to stop other groups at the same time of day (around 5:00 p.m.)!21
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has investigated police departments across the country. The DOJ’s reports of the Ferguson Police Department (FPD), the Baltimore City Police Department (BCPD), and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) find that through different policies, these police departments have systematically discriminated against Black residents. In Ferguson, police targeted Blacks in order to increase revenue for the city.22 In Baltimore, a “zero-tolerance” policy “prioritized officers making large number of stops, searches, and arrests—often resorting to force—with minimal training and insufficient oversight from supervisors or through other accountability structures”; this zero-tolerance policy was highly enforced in African American neighborhoods and less so in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.23 And in the majority-minority city of Chicago, the DOJ found that police were “insufficiently trained and supported to do their work effectively,” thus fostering CPD’s pattern or practice of “unreasonable force, [which] includes shooting at fleeing suspects who present no immediate threat,” “firing at vehicles without justification,” exhibiting “poor discipline in discharging weapons,” and making “tactical decisions that unnecessarily increase the risk of deadly encounters.”24 Black lives are more at risk in their interactions with the police.
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow reveals that at every step in the criminal justice system, Black people are treated differently than whites are, putting them at risk for harsher penalties. Scholars have found that Blacks are no more likely to do illegal drugs than whites are, but Blacks face greater penalties for doing so when caught. One major consequence of this is that people of color now make up 67 percent of the US prison population even though they only account for 37 percent of the population. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men are, and Latinos are twice as likely.25 Black women and Latinas are also overrepresented in prison populations, and nearly two-thirds of them are mothers of a minor child.26 The journalist Matt Ford notes, “a brush with the criminal-justice system can hamstring a former inmate’s employment and financial opportunities for life.”27 After individuals leave prison, they are likely to be treated as second-class citizens until the day they die.
Racial representation in US jails and prisons. The United States imprisons a greater proportion of its residents than does any other country in the world. Currently, the nation’s criminal justice system includes 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails. There are also military prisons, immigration detention facilities, prisons in the US territories, and civil commitment centers. There are about 2.3. million people in this system. (Prison Policy Initiative)
Lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for US residents born in 2001. (The Sentencing Project)
Moreover, research on the death penalty also shows that while Black men are the most likely victims of homicide, their perpetrators are least likely to receive the death penalty. That is to say, the race of the victim has a great deal to do with how the criminal justice system treats perpetrators. The death penalty is most likely to be handed down to those who murder whites.28 Relatedly, among the cases of people who shot another person and claimed that they were “standing their ground,” “individuals (i.e. defendants) in Florida were more likely to avoid charges if the victim was Black or Latino but not if the victim was White. Indeed, individuals are nearly two times more likely to be convicted in a case that involves White victims compared to those involving Black and Latino victims.”29 Putting aside the debates about the morality, necessity, or effectiveness of either the death penalty or “stand your ground” laws, outcomes of the judiciary reveal that Black lives don’t matter, evidenced by the lack of penalization for the loss of Black life. The current Movement for Black Lives has encouraged people to protest against the most blatant forms of state violence and discrimination against Blacks, but this violence plays out in different, subtler ways across other domains of American life.
FAQ
Wait a second. . . . Aren’t there a disproportionate number of Black people in prison because they commit a disproportionate amount of crime?
No. Let’s take a step back. We focus here on the disproportionate amount of Black and Latinx people in prisons and jails in order to highlight the inequities rooted both in the law as written and in the way the law is implemented. But generally speaking, when a person asks a question like the one above, they are asking if Black people are simply more prone to criminal behavior than other groups. The answer to that question is also no.
When we think about issues of crime and race, we have to keep in mind that we do not live in a vacuum. We have to consider the context. For example, the War on Drugs has had a disproportionate impact on communities of color. More communities of color, especially poor communities, were surveilled, and thus more people of color were arrested. Another way of thinking about this is that whites are systematically underrepresented in prisons due to drug-related crimes. Whites report doing more illegal drugs than Blacks do, but Black people are more likely to be punished for doing so. Research shows that contexts matters a great deal, and when scholars control for things like income and wealth,30 nearly all of the things that people believe are distinctly pathological for Blacks, such as “culture,” go away. Or in other words, once we account for poverty and wealth, Blacks and whites behave about the same way, but there are simply a greater proportion of Blacks who are poor and lack wealth.
Second—let’s just get this out of the way—it is true that a Black person who is murdered is most likely to be murdered by another Black person, but there is also such a thing as “white-on-white” crime. If someone is going to kill (or rape) you, he or she probably already knows you. Aside from being incredibly disturbing, this statistic is fascinating because what it really reveals is how segregated a society the United States is.
Inter- and intraracial homicides. (Baumgartner, Grigg, and Mastro, “#BlackLivesDon’tMatter,” 213)
Third, according to the FBI, there were about 7.5 million people arrested for about three dozen crimes in 2015—ranging from violent crimes to