One thing the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, has sent back to the surface is just how difficult it is to have cross-racial discussions about crime and punishment in this country. That is largely because perceptually and experientially, we live in vastly different worlds, worlds in which phrases like “bad choices,” “personal responsibility” and “tailspin of culture” must battle for primacy with “structural inequity,” “systemic bias” and “culture of oppression.”
One thing the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, has sent back to the surface is just how difficult it is to have cross-racial discussions about crime and punishment in this country. That is largely because perceptually and experientially, we live in vastly different worlds, worlds in which phrases like “bad choices,” “personal responsibility” and “tailspin of culture” must battle for primacy with “structural inequity,” “systemic bias” and “culture of oppression.”
Let’s begin to unpack this by pointing to what the data say about our distortions of perception when it comes to crime.
A September report by the Sentencing Project found that “white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color, and associate people of color with criminality.” For some crimes, the overestimation was “by 20-30 percent.”
This is particularly significant in light of the fact that Americans overestimate the presence of crime in general. As a Gallup report pointed out recently: “For more than a decade, Gallup has found the majority of Americans believing crime is up, although actual crime statistics have largely shown the crime rate continuing to come down from the highs in the 1990s and earlier.”
If we continue to think that crime is up, data be damned, and we associate people of color with that crime, of course our concepts of guilt, innocence, veracity and compassion in encounters between police and people of color will be affected.
This is not to say that statistics don’t tell us that crime rates are disproportionately high in minority neighborhoods, but rather than ascribe that to some racial pathology — and doing so is racist on its face — we must consider the intersection of race and concentrated poverty, which is attended by everything from poorer-performing schools to fewer job opportunities.
And these areas of concentrated poverty are growing, according to a July Brookings report: “As poverty increased and spread during the 2000s, the number of distressed neighborhoods in the United States — defined as census tracts with poverty rates of 40 percent or more — climbed by nearly three-quarters.”
The report continued: “The population living in such neighborhoods grew by similar margins (76 percent, or 5 million people) to reach 11.6 million by 2008-2012.”
Are people of color simply choosing to live in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods, or have these residential patterns been imposed by generations of discriminatory housing and employment practices, and been exacerbated by the Great Recession, which was disproportionately brutal for black people?
For instance, as a 2011 report of the Center for Responsible Lending said:
“African-American and Latino borrowers are almost twice as likely to have been impacted by the crisis. Approximately one-quarter of all Latino and African-American borrowers have lost their home to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent, compared to just under 12 percent for white borrowers.”
When the police and justice systems become involved, more bias is introduced.
First of all, as The Washington Post reported, “more than three-quarters of cities on which the Census Bureau has collected data have a police presence that’s disproportionately white relative to the local population.” This is the case even though 46 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks in an August New York Times/CBS News poll thought that “the racial makeup of a community’s police department should be similar to the racial makeup of that community as a whole.”
This continues, in part, because of a cycle of mistrust and abuse of power. As the International Business Times put it in August: “Law enforcement agencies, therefore, are often hard pressed to find black applicants. Recruiters want to fill their ranks with officers of all backgrounds, experts say, but cultural biases put them at a disadvantage.”
Would you want to join a force that you saw as oppressive and discriminatory toward your community? For some, the answer may be yes, to effect change or just because they are so drawn to the profession. But obviously for many the answer is no.
The Times/CBS poll found that 45 percent of African-Americans, compared with just 7 percent of whites, believed they had experienced a specific instance of discrimination by the police because of their race. Thirty-one percent of whites even acknowledge that police in most neighborhoods are more likely to use deadly force against a black person.
This is not unfounded. Young blacks are significantly more likely than young whites to be arrested for things like drug usage although their usage is roughly the same as whites.
This conversation is hard because we are yelling across a canyon of disparity. Maybe the first thing to do is to work on filling the canyon, leveling the field — that will help bridge the gap.