I personally trained with many in law enforcement. What a lot of people appear to be afraid to say is that the police basically train by playing cops and robbers and are rewarded for being paranoid, because during training the goal of those training them is generally to make the cop assume every situation is a lethal threat. The other aspect is that the entire criminal justice system is blatantly racist. A study in Kalamazoo revealed:
Black motorists are more likely to be stopped and yet they are less likely to get a citation, indicating there is quite likely some bias towards stopping black people even without a decent cause.
Black motorists were more likely to be searched and arrested, despite white motorists having contraband on them when searched to a rather significant degree.
Beyond Kalamazoo, a doctoral anthropology student, Cody T. Ross, at the University of California found black men are 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police while being unarmed.
Samuel R. Sommers and Satia A. Marotta also make a solid argument for how racial biases, often unconscious, affect not only policing and sentencing disparities but that the limited research on the subject has shown that there is significant discrimination during the charging process by both police and prosecutor. It is the idea of racism as it affects police and other members of the criminal justice system being buried into their subconscious that is especially hard to address and correct.
‘Discrimination and Implicit Bias in a Racially Unequal Society,’ by R. Richard Banks, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, and Lee Ross is an interesting read that is at least available online for free through the Michigan eLibrary’s access to EBSCO. It more academically addresses many of the arguments I have made, plus many more. It also calls out some of the causes for racial biases having some merit, albeit the authors do not word it in such a light as being a counter-argument to their findings of racial discrimination. They looked at US Census Bureau information and FBI data to determine that approximately 13% of the US’s population is African American, but they commit 47.2% of murders, 53.3% of robberies, 32.7% of assaults, and 31.9% of rapes. They also point out that:
“While Blacks are four times more likely than Whites to be killed by police, police officers are also five times more likely to be killed by a Black person than by a White person.”
There are almost innumerable types of racial discrimination at play in our criminal justice system. Many of the implicit biases may even exist for reasons we as a society are too uncomfortable to address, including our basic instincts to identify with people who look more like ‘us.’ In the end, one can’t deny there are deep problems with economic stratification between blacks and whites in America as well as basic subconscious associations with both white and black police officers as well as society in general that the more someone appears to be ‘stereotypically black,’ the more society tends to both fear them and treat them with far less empathy. I suspect it is how those last two problems intertwine that feeds into a problem most people are too afraid to fully analyze without some degree of self-censorship. Luckily, I say a lot of things I shouldn’t. We need people who do that or people like President Trump will fill that void without any actual analytical ability or study on the subject matter they are presidentially over.
Joker's Wild 