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LARGE GAPS, NO EASY ANSWERS
To measure the breadth of arrest disparities, USA TODAY examined data that police departments report to the FBI each year. For each agency, USA TODAY compared the number of black people arrested during 2011 and 2012 with the number who lived in the area the department protects. (The FBI tracks arrests by race; it does not track arrests of Hispanics.)
The review did not include thousands of smaller departments or agencies that serve areas with only a small black population. It also did not include police agencies in most parts of Alabama, Florida and Illinois because those states had not reported complete arrest data to the FBI.
The review showed:
• Blacks are more likely than others to be arrested in almost every city for almost every type of crime. Nationwide, black people are arrested at higher rates for crimes as serious as murder and assault, and as minor as loitering and marijuana possession.
• Arrest rates are particularly lopsided in some pockets of the country, including St. Louis' Missouri suburbs near Ferguson. In St. Louis County alone, more than two dozen police departments had arrest rates more lopsided than Ferguson's. In nearby Clayton, Mo., for example, only about 8% of residents are black, compared with about 57% of people the police arrested, according to the city's FBI reports. Clayton's police chief, Kevin Murphy, said in a prepared statement that "Ferguson has laid bare the fact that everyone in law enforcement needs to take a hard look at how we can better serve our communities and address any disparities that have existed in our departments for too long."
• Deep disparities show up even in progressive university towns. USA TODAY found police in Berkeley, Calif., and Madison, Wis., arrested black people at a rate more than nine times higher than members of other racial groups. Madison Police Chief Michael Koval said most of the arrests happen in the poorest sections of the city, which are disproportionately black, and where some residents have pleaded for even more police presence. Still, he said, "I think it would be remiss to suggest the police get out of this whole thing with a free pass. We have to constantly be doing the introspective look at who we are hiring and how we are training."
• Arrest rates are lopsided almost everywhere. Only 173 of the 3,538 police departments USA TODAY examined arrested black people at a rate equal to or lower than other racial groups.
Phillip Goff, president of the University of California Los Angeles' Center for Policing Equity, said such comparisons are "seductively misleading" because they say more about how racial inequities play out than about what causes them. Those disparities are closely tied to other social and economic inequities, he said, and like most things that involve race, they defy simple explanations.
"There is no doubt a significant degree of law enforcement bias that is the engine for this. But there's also no controversy that educational quality and employment discrimination lead to this," he said. "It's not an indicator of how big a problem there is with a police department. It's an aggregator of what's going on in the community."
Still, he said, "there's some level of disparity that is a warning sign."
Whatever the causes, Harris said such pronounced disparities have consequences. "Believe me, the people who are subject to this are noticing it and they're noticing it not just individually but as a group. It gets talked about, handed down, and it sows distrust of the whole system," he said.
'THEY WERE BEATING HIM UP'
In Dearborn, distrust was sown years ago.
Dearborn is the birthplace of the modern auto industry, a mostly white and Arab suburb snugged into the southwest corner of Detroit, the poorest and blackest of America's major cities. Its border was long a stark racial divide. Until 1978, the city was presided over by a mayor, Orville Hubbard, who said he favored segregation and boasted to newspapers that he would use the instruments of government to keep blacks from moving in. He had "Keep Dearborn Clean" emblazoned on the city's police cars.
"Our history is not always something we can be proud of. But we've learned from our mistakes," Haddad, Dearborn's police chief, said. "It's unfair that we have to keep fighting that ghost."
Dearborn today is different, he said. The police force has worked to build ties with the city's large community of Arab immigrants. Its officers have cameras in their cars and microphones on their uniforms. Soon, some will start wearing body cameras, too. Their use of force has plummeted in recent years, and so have civilian complaints.
Haddad said most of his department's arrests come after traffic stops on the city's busy arteries, or at the mall, one of the large shopping centers closest to Detroit. Many of the people his officers arrest live in Detroit – a city beset by poverty, violent crime and a faltering school system – and are passing through to work or shop.
Still, allegations of discrimination have persisted there for decades. The local NAACP branch accused Dearborn police of singling out blacks for traffic stops in 1997. Civil rights lawsuits – alleging excessive force and officers using racial epithets epitaphs – have piled up, too, though the number of such complaints has fallen sharply in recent years.
"There's a lot of storied history, but I think a lot of that is either false or times have changed," said Gregg Algier, who retired from Dearborn's police department this summer after 22 years. "There's no one really getting targeted for their race."
But in suburban Detroit, there is also little doubt that blacks are far more likely to face arrest than people of other races. For example, police in Livonia, another Detroit suburb, arrested blacks at a rate 16 times higher than others. In neighboring Allen Park, it's 20 times higher.
"Our numbers are what our numbers are. Our officers aren't being told to look for any particular demographic. We come across what we come across," Allen Park Police Chief James Wilkewitz said. Allen Park has two interstate highways and a large retail complex not far from the edge of Detroit, and many of the people the city's police arrest live somewhere else.
In some ways, Dearborn has become an odd place to hear such complaints. Its police department won a civil rights award this year. Haddad is the state's first Arab-American police chief. And among the most significant lawsuits over policing there is a complaint that county sheriff's deputies didn't do enough to protect a group of white Christians who were protesting at an Arab festival in Dearborn.
Still, Haddad acknowledges the accumulated mistrust. "There are people who feel that way, and they have cause to feel that way," he said. "We shouldn't be defined by one bad episode."
Dearborn has a history of those, too.
On Father's Day in 2008, for example, two Dearborn officers arrested a diabetic man who had been pulled over by the side of a freeway. The man, Ernest Griglen, 59, was on disability from Detroit's school system after he hurt his ankle helping a special education student off the bus.
An Allen Park police officer stopped Griglen, who was black, after seeing him climb out of his car in the middle of the road. She wrote in a report that she thought he was upset; doctors later concluded he was having a diabetic episode, a sudden drop in blood sugar that relatives said could make him seem dazed or drunk.
Two Dearborn officers arrived moments later. One, Richard Michalski, wrote that officers were afraid Griglen might have a gun in his waistband, so they "guided him to the ground," and wrestled him into handcuffs. The gun turned out to be an insulin pump.
Witnesses remembered it differently. One, Yolanda Lipsey, testified in a deposition that the Dearborn officers threw Griglen to the ground and "just started hitting him, hitting him and kicking him. … They were beating him up."
When she saw her husband, Pam Griglen thought he had been in a car accident. "His clothes were all torn and dirty and looked scuffed. He had a large knot on his forehead, it was like the size of a golf ball, and he had what looked like boot prints on his face," she said. "I just couldn't believe it. And he said 'They beat me, Pam.'"
Griglen complained that his head hurt. Then he said he could not see. "That was the last time my husband spoke to me," Pam Griglen said. He spent the next 11 months in a coma and finally died in 2009. The medical examiner listed his cause of death as bleeding in his brain, caused by "blunt force head trauma."
Dearborn settled a lawsuit brought by Griglen's family. The department reprimanded both officers for turning in their use of force reports late. (Michalski later resigned after he was charged with assault and brandishing a firearm during an off-duty traffic incident. He declined to comment.)
"The Dearborn policemen seem like they're kind of a little rougher with the black community," Pam Griglen said. "My husband was a good man, a hard worker. He took care of his family. He had a diabetic episode and they thought the worst. Thought he was drunk. Thought he had a gun. Black man in a Cadillac. They thought the worst."
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
MikeydaGawd;7556045 said:Really not news to us, but probably for white America
Stiff;7556051 said:Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
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13th Amendment of the Constitution
The keyword is EXCEPT. Slavery was never abolished in this country. The conditions for enslavement were just tweaked. All they have to do now is arbitrarily and selectively decide what's a crime and what's not and BOOM, new slaves.
Make some laws, and enforce them over here, but maybe not enforce them so much over here. That's the name of the game today.
