Racial Profiling
Sunday Tweets: Live from New Haven, CT
Published August 02, 2009 @ 12:59PM PT
Blogging has been a bit light this week; I’ve just finished moving from Brooklyn, NY to New Haven, CT – so I’ve been without the interwebs (the horror!) for a few days. Thanks for the emails and comments over the last couple of days, I’ll be sorting through things tomorrow and getting back to you ASAP.
Here are some tweet-sized crime and punishment links from the week:
Drug-free school zones in Connecticut (my new home state!) are too large to make any logical sense (like most states), and therefore the enhanced charge is usually thrown out.
There’s an interesting conversation going on in the comments after my post this week on veterans’ courts, and here’s an in-depth report from the Colorado Springs Gazette on violent crime committed by vets.
Florida has banned prisoners from posting ads for pen pals and relationships.
White Drivers Have More Contraband
Published July 27, 2009 @ 07:45PM PT
A study of police traffic stops and car searches in Illinois has shown that minority drivers are more likely to be stopped by police and more likely to be asked permission to search the car - but much less likely than white drivers to have illegal items like guns and drugs in their cars.
President Barack Obama worked on starting this annual state study of race and traffic stops when he was a state senator, and he alluded to the study in his first round of remarks about GatesGate July 22. The racial numbers have been consistent since the study launched in 2004, but at least the number of times officers ask drivers for consent to search is declining overall. Some data from the 2008 study, via the Chicago Tribune:
- When a vehicle of a white driver was "consent-searched," officers statewide found contraband 24.7 percent of the time.
- When a vehicle driven by a minority was searched, officers found contraband 15.4 percent of the time.
- Minority drivers statewide were about twice as likely as whites to be asked for consent to search their vehicle.
- In Chicago, minority drivers were four times more likely to get searched, down from five times more likely in the last study.
- Statewide, minority drivers were 13 percent more likely than white drivers to be stopped.
- Overall, consent searches are down 30 percent since 2004.
"The fact is every single year we see these same numbers," said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU of Illinois. "There is just a predisposition to believe minorities have contraband. ... The data and the indisputable nature of this is exactly what the president was talking about the other night."
Racial Profiling is Alive and Well
Published July 23, 2009 @ 04:05PM PT
Racial profiling is alive and well...and the Skip Gates case won't change that.
It has been a week since Harvard Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., one of our country's preeminent scholars of African American studies, was arrested for breaking into his own home. I was planning to leave this story alone, because you've read about it on every other blog in the world. But it's still on my mind, and Barack Obama breathed new life into the issue yesterday, so I thought I'd share some of the more thought-provoking stuff I've seen on this issue around the web in the last week.
First of all, the details of Gates' arrest are in dispute. Gates wasn't arrested for breaking and entering, he was arrested for disorderly conduct for allegedly disobeying the officer who asked for his ID. Gates disputes the officer's version of events, but only the two of them know what happened. The officer involved apparently teaches new recruits how to avoid profiling.
Despite this, however, I think it's clear that this arrest - and even the involvement of police in the first place - would have been less likely if Gates were a white Harvard professor and not a black Harvard professor. And I think it's also clear that regardless of whatever happened in Cambridge, racial profiling isn't going anywhere soon.
Some Troubling Numbers on Racial Profiling
Published July 02, 2009 @ 02:24PM PT
The ACLU has submitted a new report to the U.N. on racial profiling in the criminal justice system, and the findings ain't pretty. The report points out that the international community defines racial profiling as a human rights violation and alleges that the U.S. isn't fulfilling its obligation under a U.N. treaty to end racial discrimination.
"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S," said Chandra Bhatnagar of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), lead author of a new report sent to a U.N. rights body this week.
The report points out to Operation Front Line, an anti-terrorism program aimed at deterring and uncovering terrorist plots among immigrant groups in the U.S. in the months before the 2004 presidential election. A review of the program found that "foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted than similarly situated individuals from other countries."
But the U.S. isn't the only country breaking the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Some new numbers from France paint a similar picture on the other side of the Atlantic.
A new report from the Open Society Institute finds that black people are six times more likely to be stopped by French police than whites, people who look to be of Arab descent are seven times more likely to be stopped.
Police, Race and Friendly Fire
Published May 31, 2009 @ 11:04AM PT
The tragic shooting death of 25-year-old New York City police officer Omar Edwards on Thursday has raised anew questions of racial profiling and the use of deadly force by police officers. Edwards was off duty and drew his gun while chasing a suspect, his fellow officers saw the gun and shot. The investigation is ongoing and there's no way to say whether anyone is at fault in this horrible scenario. When officers see someone with a gun in their hand, they often must act quickly. Perhaps they acted too quickly, perhaps they had no choice. It's too early to say, and may be unproductive to place blame amid such terrible circumstances.
But there's no getting around it - this case treads in racially charged territory. Edwards was black and the officer who shot him was white. Whether it was a factor in this case or not, racial profiling is alive and well in our county. I would argue that an African-American police officer has a greater chance of being shot in circumstances like this than a white officer. And that's something we need to change.
