Blake Deal: No clear systemic bias against minorities in criminal justice system
By Blake Deal
May 24, 2016 12:00 a.m.
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders continues to decry the victimization of blacks and Hispanics at the hands of the police on his website, saying:
“It is an outrage that in these early years of the 21st century we are seeing intolerable acts of violence being perpetrated by police and racist acts of terrorism by white supremacists.”
The Vermont senator’s comments are characteristic of a sentiment first made popular by the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement which continues to claim we live “in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” by the police. Both parties believe the criminal justice system is deeply biased against racial minorities, which explains the high amount of incarceration and police-related deaths of these groups.
However, these popular sentiments stem from a false cultural mythology and nothing more. There is no clear evidence that any systemic bias exists in the criminal justice system against minorities, and to continue to assert there is a bias harmfully perpetuates racial conflict.
It is regrettable that anyone is shot and killed by the police every year, but it is not as if most police officers are closeted white supremacists who use their position as an excuse to murder racial minorities. In fact, more whites are killed by the police than blacks and Hispanics combined. In 2015, the police shot and killed 494 whites compared to 258 blacks and 172 Hispanics.
But we further confuse the issues if we assume all of these police killings were committed unjustly; the police are actually justified in the vast majority of these cases. Out of the 990 police-related deaths in 2015, 783 of the victims threatened the police with deadly weapons, including guns, knives and box cutters. Fifty-four more cases involved police shooting suspects who had led them on high-speed car chases, where many even attempted to run over police officers with their vehicles. This should immediately lead us to conclude that a whopping 837 police-related deaths out of the 990 total are more than likely to be justified, while the other 153 cases ought to be investigated on a case-by-case basis.
It is awful that the police kill people at all, but in many cases they have no other recourse. In a nation of more than 320 million people, it is perfectly understandable that the police end up shooting a few hundred criminals a year, especially since that majority of these criminals threatened the police with a deadly weapon.
Still, one may object that the number of blacks and Hispanics killed or imprisoned by the police is significantly higher than whites. After all, in 2014, blacks and Hispanics alone composed about 60 percent of inmates at state and federal prisons even though they are about a quarter of the population.
Attributing the high rate of black and Hispanic incarceration, along with police-related deaths, to systemic biases ignores the fact that both groups commit significantly more violent crime than any other race or ethnicity.
There are far more black homicides perpetrated by blacks themselves than the police or Sanders’ “white supremacists” combined. According to FBI statistics – which unfortunately does not include Hispanics – there have been more than 2,400 black homicides every year from 2010-2015 and more than 2,200 of these homicides each year were perpetrated by black offenders. While blacks compose around 13 percent of the nation, they are consistently responsible for upward of 43 percent of all homicides nationally.
As for Hispanics, an organization called New Century Foundation published a study called The Color of Crime by Edwin S. Rubenstein, a researcher with an M.A. in public financing. Though New Century Foundation is described as a “white separatist” organization by Wikipedia, Rubenstein competently analyzes data from a range of governmental sources. In a table organizing data from a California Department of Justice report in 2013, it states Hispanics are more likely to be arrested for most categories of violent crime than whites. Most notably, Hispanics between the ages of ten to seventeen are 8.178 times more likely than whites to be arrested for homicide, and 2.98 times more likely to be arrested for robbery.
I make no claims about why blacks and Hispanics commit more crime, only that in a majority of cases, minority criminals are to blame and not the police. If someone objects to all this, saying historical factors have lead minorities to be more impoverished and therefore to have a greater propensity to commit crime, that is fine, but this claim has nothing to do with the claim that police purposely target minorities.
What all this information ought to lead us to conclude is that there is no clear systemic bias against blacks or Hispanics evident in either incarceration rates or police-related deaths. Police brutality in the case of Walter Scott or Laquan McDonald is the exception, not the rule.
Sanders, Black Lives Matter and their supporters have a tendency to automatically conclude hidden injustices must be the cause of racial crime disparities when this is usually not the case. We must use reliable data when discussing supposed police brutality and not sensationalist anecdotes that tickle people’s sensibilities.
