A “Chilling” Study? Chill!

Education, Law, Politics, ,

Given the news media’s interest in surveys, a poorly-designed survey has the potential to spread a lot of misinformation. In late August, Dr. John Villasenor of UCLA surveyed 1500 college students’ understanding of and attitudes toward freedom of speech. He wrote up the results in an essay published by the Brookings Institution, explaining that the survey had not yet been subjected to peer review, but due to “the timeliness of the topic, I believe it is important to get some of the key results out in the public sphere immediately.”

The survey results were covered by several mainstream media, including CNN and the Wall Street Journal. They were summarized by Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post under the title “A chilling study shows how hostile college students are toward free speech.”

In his article, Dr. Villasenor reported five results of the survey.  Respondents were asked “Does the First Amendment protect ‘hate speech?’”  A plurality of 44% answered “no,” compared to 39% who said “yes,” and 16% who didn’t know. They were wrong, since the First Amendment protects offensive speech unless it is a threat or is directed toward producing imminent lawless action. Women were more likely than men to hold this incorrect belief.

Respondents were given the following hypothetical scenario.

A majority of students agreed, with Democrats being more likely than Republicans to condone shouting down a speaker.

They were also asked about the use of violence to silence a speaker.

The approval rate was much lower, but the fact that 19% approved of violence is certainly disconcerting. Men were more likely than women to condone violence.

Given the same scenario, respondents were asked whether “under the First Amendment, the on-campus organization sponsoring the event is legally required to ensure that the event includes not only the offensive speaker but also a speaker who presents an opposing view.” A majority (62%) incorrectly agreed that there was a legal requirement of balance.

Finally, respondents were given an item from a 2016 Gallup poll in which they were asked to choose between two types of university learning environments:

  • Option 1: Create a positive learning environment for all students by prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people.
  • Option 2: Create an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people.

A 53% majority chose the first option of prohibiting offensive speech, while 47% opted for the more open environment.

Shortly after the article was published, doubts about the validity of the survey were raised, with one critic labeling it “junk science.” It turns out that Dr. Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering with no prior experience conducting surveys. His research was sponsored by the conservative Charles Koch Foundation. Of course, neither of these facts necessarily invalidates the survey.

A more important problem is that it is not clear how Dr. Villasenor obtained his sample. He does not claim that the survey was administered to a random sample of college students, but merely that the sample was “geographically diverse” and “approximately mirrors” the undergraduate population. This has led critics to conclude that he used a convenience sample of students who were available, but not necessarily representative of college students. Dr. Villasenor has acknowledged that this was an “opt-in” survey, a term used to refer to a survey using volunteers whose biases are unknown.

Dr. Villasenor further irritated survey experts by stating the confidence intervals, or the margin or error, around his results. This is inappropriate unless a random sample is used. (It should be noted that Dr. Villasenor covered his butt by saying that these confidence intervals were valid “to the extent” that his respondents were representative of college students, without actually claiming that they were representative.)

Dr. Villasenor also neglected to mention that his survey was conducted just a few days after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which a peaceful demonstrator was killed. This violent incident may have temporarily reduced students’ tolerance for offensive speech.

Finally, it should be noted that in 2016, when Gallup asked a nationally representative sample of college students, carefully chosen using probability sampling, to choose between the two learning environments described above, 78% chose Option 2, the more open environment. While it is possible that student attitudes have changed dramatically in the past year, it is also possible that differences in sampling were responsible for the discrepancy.

Catherine Rampell defended Dr. Villasenor’s survey, correctly noting that no survey uses perfect random sampling in that sense that respondents are randomly chosen from a complete and accurate single list of all the college students in the country. However, her defense blurs the distinction between carefully conducted probability sampling and the apparently more haphazard methods used by Dr. Villasenor.

Sophia McClennen of Penn State has labeled Villasenor’s survey an example of “blue-baiting,” in which conservative organizations attempt to manufacture doubt about free speech protections on campus in order to undermine public confidence in higher education.  (This may be working.)

At the very least, the controversy suggests that journalists should be careful to determine that professional sampling techniques are used before reporting survey results.  On the other hand, some college students did give these responses, even if they came from a biased sample. This suggests that high schools and universities should devote more attention to educating students on the meaning and scope of the First Amendment.

You may also be interested in reading:

Republicans Say Colleges are Bad For the Country

The Problem is Civil Obedience

Law, Politics,

Judging by the last few days’ letters to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Trumped-up controversy over NFL players protesting racial injustice has angered that segment of our country’s population that disapproves of civil disobedience. Trust the late historian Howard Zinn to have the perfect response. (Thanks to columnist Will McCorkle for reminding me of this quote.)

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves . . . (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

In this video, Matt Damon reads longer excerpts from the speech from which this passage was drawn. Dr. Zinn delivered it in 1970, when Americans were protesting the Vietnam War.

Of course, it’s more than a little incongruous to hear a speech condemning (among other things) wealth inequality read by an actor who earns $20 million or more for making a single film.

Inequality of Wealth

Economics, Politics,

The Federal Reserve has released its 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances. The charts below were compiled by the People’s Policy Project. The takeaway is that in 2016 the top 10% owned 77% of the country’s wealth, and 38.5% is owned by the top 1%.

Not surprisingly, the gap between rich and poor is increasing. The top 1% owned “only” 29.9% of the nation’s wealth in 1989.

After declining slightly due to the great recession of 2008, the wealth gap between Blacks, Whites and Latinos is increasing again. Mean White family wealth is now greater than it was in 2007, but Blacks and Latinos have not yet recovered from the recession. (By the way, if these dollar amounts seem high, remember that they are means, which are skewed by the wealth of those at the top. The medians are much lower.)

This provides an interesting backdrop for the Republican Tax Plan, which cuts the top individual tax rate from 39.5% to 35%, and reduces the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. (Since capital-based income is concentrated among the rich, a corporate tax cut is simply another tax cut for the rich.) It also eliminates the estate tax. To partially pay for these giveaways, the President proposes cuts of $4.3 trillion to Social Security, Medicaid, public education and other non-military spending. The House Republican budget calls for a $5.8 trillion cut in these same programs.

Here are the results of an analysis by the Tax Policy Center of who benefits from Trump’s tax plan.

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On Obama’s Speech

Whose Opinion Matters?

Documenting the Flint Effect

Environment, Health, , ,

In April 2014, Flint, MI’s state-appointed Emergency Manager Darnell Earley made a decision to save $5 million by switching Flint, MI’s water source from Lake Huron to the heavily polluted Flint River. High acidity in the river eroded the protective coating on the city’s lead water pipes, introducing lead into the water supply. Lead is associated with a variety of health and behavioral problems, including impaired growth, kidney damage, high blood pressure, lower intelligence and criminal behavior. Emails show that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a former venture capitalist with an estimated net worth of $200 million, attempted to cover up the crisis for several months. It is difficult to determine what role the racial and socioeconomic composition of Flint—as opposed to Republican business values—played in the origin of the crisis or the delay in addressing it. Flint is 53% Black and 45% of its residents live below the poverty line.

New research demonstrates some of the results of lead exposure for Flint’s citizens. A paper by Drs. Daniel Grossman of the University of West Virginia and David Slusky of the University of Kansas looked at its consequences for fertility and fetal death rates. Dr. Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech—who played an important role in documenting the lead levels in Flint—had previously found decreases in fertility and increases in fetal deaths as a result of lead exposure through drinking water.

The Flint water crisis can be seen as a natural experiment with tragic consequences. Their analysis is an interrupted time series design with multiple comparison groups. The interruption occurred in April 2014, when Flint’s water supply was contaminated. The researchers examined changes in several variables of interest in Flint from before to after that date, using Michigan’s 15 other largest cities as comparison groups. Racial, socioeconomic and other demographic characteristics of the parents and children were statistically controlled. Here are the highlights:

  • The fertility rate after April 2014 was 8.5 births per 1000 women lower in Flint than in the comparison cities. This is a 12% decline in fertility and amounts to between 198 and 276 fewer children born in Flint during the time of the study due to the water crisis. Here are the trend lines.
  • There was a “horrifyingly large” 58% increase in the fetal death rate—defined as pregnancies of more than 20 weeks that do not result in a live birth—compared to other Michigan cities. This explains some, but not all, of the decline in fertility.
  • After April 2014, the overall health of Flint’s babies was not as good as those born in the other cities. They were born half a week sooner, were 150 grams lighter at birth, and gained 5 grams per week less than babies in the comparison groups. They also contained a .74% higher percentage of females. This is explained by the fact that male fetuses are more susceptible to prenatal damage.

Alternative explanations for an interrupted time series design focus on the possibility that something else happened in Flint in April 2014 that did not happen in Detroit’s other cities that affected its fertility rate. Maybe the change in the smell or taste of the water was sufficiently alarming to Flint residents to cause them to have less sex, or at least less unprotected sex.

Even if Flint residents avoided pregnancy during the water crisis, this does not explain the increase in fetal deaths or the differences in the health of newborns.

Dr. Slusky discusses the results of their study in this video.

It is likely that the residents of Flint will be dealing with social problems due to the lead crisis for decades, possibly even for generations. The Michigan Attorney General has filed indictments against 15 individuals for their roles in the crisis, but experience suggests that they are unlikely to be held accountable in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, experts are suggesting that residents of many other U. S. cities are being poisoned by lead. Of course, if we continue to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, we are less likely to be aware of the seriousness of the problem.

You may also be interested in reading:

Get the Lead Out, Part 1

Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Heavy Traffic

A Plague on Both Your Houses

Media, Politics, ,

False equivalencies abound in today’s journalism. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.

Thomas Patterson

President Trump’s recent statement that the tragedy in Charlottesville, VA was due to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” has led to renewed interest in the concept of false equivalence or false balancing. False equivalence occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of non-partisanship, give the incorrect impression that there is an equal amount of evidence supporting both sides of a controversial issue. For many years, media coverage of climate change implied that there were an equal amount of evidence supporting or questioning the claim that the Earth was getting warmer due to human activity. False balancing usually occurs with a single article, but when discussing several articles over a period of time, false equivalence is the better term.

I recently became aware of a report by Dr. Thomas Patterson, a political scientist with Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, entitled “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” The data come from a content analysis of all campaign items appearing between the second week of August through Election Day in five newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today) and the main nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC. They were collected by Media Tenor, a firm which specializes in such analyses. Each campaign news item was classified according to its theme and whether its depiction of the candidate was positive, negative or not clear. Here are some highlights.

First, the basics. Donald Trump received more news coverage than Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign. Whether this was an advantage is not clear, however, given the tone of the coverage.

Those who believe in the folk theory of democracy—that voters have stable policy preferences, attend to the policy statements of the candidates, and vote for the candidate whose position most closely matches their own—will be disappointed by the themes of the 2016 coverage. The candidates’ policy stands were mentioned in only 10% of the stories. As is the recent past, the most frequent theme was “horserace” coverage—that is, who’s winning, usually illustrated by poll results.

The tone of the coverage of the nominees was consistently negative, both during the general election and the entire campaign, including the primaries.

Here it is, by week, for each candidate separately.

In the critical final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s coverage became slightly more positive while Clinton’s veered in the negative direction. This was undoubtedly due to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. This is shown more clearly in this chart of Clinton’s week-by-week “scandal” coverage.

Patterson computed a theme regarding the candidates’ fitness for the office of president, which combined reports on their policy positions, personal traits, leadership skills and ethical standards. According to the media, they were equivalent.

There has been a long-term trend toward greater negativity in coverage of the presidential candidates over the past 56 years.

The negativity is not confined to political candidates. Their coverage of other recent issues has also been negative. In psychology, negativity bias refers to the fact that negative information has a greater effect on human behavior than neutral or positive information. Media coverage of public issues may be both an effect and a cause of negativity bias.

Patterson makes two important points about these results. First, the relentlessly negative tone of the coverage contributes to cynicism and apathy among the voters, which could have reduced voter turnout. Research suggests that lower voter turnout benefits Republican candidates. Secondly, he argues that the uniformly negative coverage created the false impression of equivalence between the candidates. This raises the question of how researchers can demonstrate false equivalence empirically. To what external criterion can the media coverage be compared?

In some cases, external standards are available. For example, in the case of climate change, researchers can compute the percentage of peer-reviewed scientific articles that find evidence of human influence on the climate or can survey climatologists to find out what percentage of them believe that global warming is human-caused.

Patterson is writing for an academic and/or politically engaged audience that is likely to accept his assumptions that Clinton’s email scandal was less serious that the legal and ethical problems faced by Trump, and that Clinton was better prepared to be president than Trump. Obviously, not all voters agreed. Unfortunately, he presents no objective evidence to support these implicit claims, and it’s not even clear what data he could have consulted.

While false equivalence is an important source of media bias, demonstrating its existence empirically will continue to be a challenge.

You may also be interested in reading:

October Surprise

Framing the Debates

False Balancing: A Case Study

Implicit Bias Against Atheists?

Cognitive psychology, Prejudice and discrimination, Religion, ,

Consider the following problem:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which alternative is more probable?

A. Linda is a bank teller.

B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

“A” is the correct answer. Since there are undoubtedly some bank tellers who are not feminists, “B” cannot be more probable than “A”. To answer “B” is to commit a conjunction fallacy, since the conjunction of two events (bank teller and feminist) cannot be more probable than one of them (bank teller) alone. We commit this error because we associate the other qualities mentioned in the description with being a feminist.

Will Gervais of the University of Kentucky and his colleagues used the conjunction fallacy to measure what they call “extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists.” Participants were 3,256 people from the United States and 12 other countries. (See the chart below for the countries). They read a description of a man who tortured animals as a child. As an adult, he engaged in several acts of violence, ending with the murder and mutilation of five homeless people. Half the participants from each country were asked:

Which alternative is more probable?

A. He is a teacher.

B. He is a teacher who is a religious believer.

The other participants were asked:

Which alternative is more probable?

A. He is a teacher.

B. He is a teacher who does not believe in god(s).

“B” is always the wrong answer, but the authors infer that if more people give this incorrect answer when the target is described as not believing in a god than when he is described as a religious believer, then the participants are (collectively) biased against atheists. Presumably, the respondents believe serial murderers are more likely to be atheists than religious people. Here are the results.

The chart shows the probability of a participant answering “B” when the target is an atheist compared to when he is religious, while statistically controlling for the participant’s gender, age, socioeconomic status and belief in god(s). There was bias against atheists in 12 of the 13 countries, the exception being Finland. Overall, people are about twice as likely to commit the conjunction fallacy when the target is described as an atheist (61%) than when he is described as religious (28%).

What is the effect of the respondents’ own belief in god(s) on answers to these questions? In the chart above, the individual’s certainty of the existence of a god increases from left to right. People at all levels of religious belief show prejudice against atheists, including atheists themselves—that is, people at the left who answered that the probability of a god’s existence is zero.

The authors did several followup studies. Using the same research method, they found that:

  • People are more likely to assume that a person who does not believe in god(s) is a serial murderer than a person who does not believe in evolution, the accuracy of horoscopes, the safety of vaccines, or the reality of global warming.
  • People are more likely to assume that a priest described as having molested young boys for decades is a priest who does not believe in god than a priest who does believe in god.

The assumption that morality depends on religious belief seems to be quite widespread, since it was obtained in religiously diverse cultures, including Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim societies. This association between atheism and bad behavior is all the more impressive given the lack of empirical evidence for a moral effect of religious beliefs.

On the other hand, 28% of the respondents who were given that choice saw the target as more likely to be a murderer if he was described as a religious believer than when his religiosity was not specified. This suggests that a minority of respondents associate religiosity with violence.

The authors describe their results as demonstrating an “intuitive” prejudice against atheists. They don’t indicate whether an intuitive belief operates consciously or without conscious intention. However, this prejudice seems to have some of the characteristics of an unconscious or implicit bias. It was measured using a fairly subtle technique. Participants were never asked to directly compare atheists with religious believers (although when the target was described as just a teacher, participants may have made the default assumption that he was religious). Furthermore, it is a bias shared by atheists themselves, suggesting that participants are repeating a popular cultural assumption, rather than reporting a belief that they have thoughtfully considered.

You may also be interested in reading:

The Implicit Association Test: Racial Bias on Cruise Control

Teaching Bias, Part 1

A Darker Side of Politics

Moving in a Different Direction

Politics, ,

The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.

Bush v. Gore (2000)

Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized during oral arguments in Bush v. Gore that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. For this reason, states can determine their own voting procedures, leading to some confusing and contradictory policies.

Voter turnout in the U. S. is notoriously low compared to other countries. Only 58% percent of the electorate showed up to vote in the 2016 presidential election. It was the first time in over 50 years that Americans voted without the protection of the Voting Rights Act. Since 2010, 22 states have passed new laws making it more difficult to vote, including voter I. D. laws, limits on the use of absentee ballots, and laws that make registration more difficult. In addition, an MIT survey estimated that 12% of voters, or 16 million people, encountered a problem while trying to vote, including long lines and defective voting machines.

Their problems are just beginning. According to the Brennan Center, so far in 2017, 99 bills have been introduced in 31 states that impose new voting restrictions. The Trump Justice Department recently announced that it has no objection to an Ohio bill that purges voters from the voting rolls if they miss three consecutive elections and fail to respond to a warning mailed to their last known address. Voter suppression laws can be seen as similar to gerrymandering in that they represent attempts by legislators to select their voters, rather than the reverse.

Those who vote in U. S. elections tend to be White, older, more affluent and more highly educated than the average citizen. People of color, young people and lower-income people are underrepresented. Voter suppression laws tend to enhance these differences. Since the groups that are most likely to be disenfranchised by them are more likely to vote for Democrats, it is not surprising that almost all these laws are passed in Republican-controlled states.

An alternative would be to make it easier for citizens to vote. One of the more promising ways to accomplish this is automatic voter registration (AVR). Oregon was the first state to enact an AVR law; it went into effect in 2016. A research team headed by Sean McElwee looked at the law and its results.

Under to the Oregon AVR law, eligible voters who have contact with the Department of Motor Vehicles are sent a letter informing them that they have been automatically added to the voter rolls. They can opt out of being registered by returning a postcard (8% opted out). This postcard can also be used to register with a political party (11% chose a party). Since Oregon has closed primaries, those who didn’t register with a party couldn’t vote in the primary.

In 2016, 186,050 people were registered for the first time through the AVR law. This was 66% of the new registrants for that year. In addition, 35,000 people whose registrations had lapsed were re-registered. A total of 67,902, or 36%, of these people voted in the 2016 election. Overall voter turnout in Oregon was 68%, up from 64% in 2012, and well above the national average. The authors estimate that 2-3% of the 4% increase in voter turnout was attributable to the AVR law.

AVR also affected the demographic composition of Oregon voters. Oregon’s voting electorate was 94% White, but 11% of those added to the rolls by AVR were people of color. The chart below compares the percentages of Black, Latino and Asian voters added by AVR to the existing electorate (non-AVR voters).Not surprisingly, AVR also reduced the average age of Oregon voters. 37% of the new AVR voters were between the ages of 18 and 29, compared to only 13% of non-AVR voters.Finally, AVR increased the percentage of low income people who voted in 2016. As shown in the chart, the new AVR voters were more likely than existing voters to come from lower income neighborhoods, and less likely to come from affluent neighborhoods.The Oregon AVR law is unusual when compared to the much greater number of laws that make it more difficult to vote. However, this raises an interesting issue. An opponent of AVR could argue that the Oregon law is nothing more than an attempt by Democrats to increase their chances in subsequent elections, and that laws that try to increase voter turnout are just as partisan as laws that try to suppress it. Since there is no constitutional right to vote and no uniform set of federal laws defining voting procedures, any change in a state law that affects voter turnout can be criticized as unfair by one party or the other.

Does the American public have a preference between encouraging and discouraging voting? An April 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center asked a representative sample to choose between the alternatives of requiring people to register to vote ahead of time, or doing “everything possible” to make it easy for citizens to vote. Here are the results, overall, and by political party.Unfortunately, these two alternatives are not true opposites. Voter registration is not the only procedure that makes it more difficult for people to vote. In addition, the question doesn’t impose any limits on doing “everything possible” to make it easier to vote. (Should they send a limo to my door on election day?) It is easy to imagine that, had respondents been given some rationale for restricting access to the ballot box, such as preventing “voter fraud,” the results might have been different. Nevertheless, we can take some comfort in the fact that, in the abstract, the public views making it easier for people to vote more favorably than making it more difficult.

You may also be interested in reading:

Why the Minority Rules

Don’t Forget Not to Vote

Voter I.D. and Race, Part 1

Mr. Crump Don’t Like It

Music, Politics,

Am I the first to notice the similarity between the names of our president and E. H. “Boss” Crump, the mayor of Memphis from 1910-1915, whose Democratic political machine dominated Tennessee state politics almost until his death in 1954?

E. H. “Boss” Crump

Unlike most Southern politicians, Boss Crump was not opposed to Blacks voting. He formed corrupt alliances with conservative Black businessmen and shared the proceeds from prostitution, gambling and drugs in the Beale Street area. These coalitions, along with a strong police force, helped him to control Black voters and to maintain racial inequality in Memphis for decades. Memphis is still one of the nation’s poorest cities and has one of its highest crime rates.

One of composer W. C. Handy’s earliest hits, “The Memphis Blues,” is said to have originated as a campaign song for Boss Crump when he first ran for mayor. Crump is also the subject of the blues song “Mr. Crump Don’t Like It,” recorded in 1927 by the Memphis Sheiks, whose vocalist was Frank Stokes. The song should not be taken literally; Boss Trump was not opposed to vice as long as he profited from it.

Jim Crow Policing

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

The nonstop humiliation of young black and Hispanic New Yorkers, including children, by police officers who feel no obligation to treat them fairly or with any respect at all is an abomination. . . Rather than a legitimate crime-fighting tool, these stops are a despicable racially oriented tool of harassment.

Bob Herbert

Bob Herbert’s angry 2010 essay, “Jim Crow Policing,” was critical of the stop-and-frisk policy of the New York Police Department (NYPD), but it could just as easily have been directed at their differential enforcement of marijuana laws.

Surveys show that Blacks and Whites use illegal drugs at similar rates. Surveys conducted by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services show that both lifetime marijuana use and use in the past year is slightly higher for Whites than for Blacks and Latinos. Yet Blacks and Latinos are arrested and incarcerated much more frequently.

In 2013, when Bill de Blasio was running for mayor of New York City, he promised to reduce the frequency with which citizens were arrested for low-level marijuana possession and the racial bias in these arrests, referring to such policies as “unjust and wrong.” He has been mayor since January 2014, so how is he doing? The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) recently published an assessment by Harry Levine, a sociologist at Queens College, CUNY, and Loren Siegel, an attorney.

On the positive side, the number of arrests for marijuana possession has gone down from about 40,000 per year to about 20,000 per year, as the chart below shows. In other words, it now takes Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD two years to make as many “unjust and wrong” arrests as his two immediate predecessors averaged in a single year.

However, there is no evidence of any reduction in racial bias. Blacks and Hispanics account for 51% of the population of New York City, with Whites accounting for most of the remaining 49%. Yet Blacks and Hispanics account for 86% of those arrested for marijuana possession and these percentages are unchanged from the Bloomberg administration.

Black and Hispanic defendants are also convicted at higher rates, although this does not necessarily imply racial discrimination by the prosecution or the courts. It may be due to their having a greater number of prior offenses.

The persistence of racial discrimination in marijuana arrests seems to be due to a combination of institutional and individual racism. Levine and Siegel suggest that two processes are at work in producing these racial disparities. First, NYPD concentrates its enforcement of marijuana possession laws in public housing projects and neighborhoods in which Blacks and Latinos make up the majority of residents. Public housing residents are 5% of the city’s population but account for 21% of marijuana arrests, with 92% of those arrested being Black or Hispanic. The city’s 37 majority Black or Hispanic precincts have about half the city’s population, but account for 66% of marijuana arrests, with 92% of those arrested being Black or Hispanic. Since the police usually base their decisions of where to deploy officers on prior arrest records, differential patrolling of Black and Hispanic areas is a type of self-perpetuating institutional bias.

The higher conviction rates of Black and Latino defendants noted above, if they are due to their prior arrest records, can also be seen as self-perpetuating institutional racism.

Secondly, NYPD also targets commercial and night life districts in mid- and lower Manhattan which attract out-of-town visitors and tourists, such as Greenwich Village, perhaps out of concern for the city’s public image. Blacks and Latinos make up relatively few of the residents of these areas, but are arrested at disproportionately high rates. In an analysis of 15 such areas, the authors report that Blacks and Hispanics were 23% of the population but 72% of those arrested. The fact that Blacks and Hispanics are in the minority in these areas suggests that their higher arrest rate is due to racial bias by individual police officers.

It’s not clear whether this lack of progress in eliminating discrimination is due to Mayor de Blasio’s lack of commitment to his campaign rhetoric or NYPD’s refusal to comply with his orders. If the latter, why was NYPD was willing to cut back on marijuana arrests but not willing to cease its racial discrimination?

Mayor de Blasio released a statement criticizing the DPA study as “misleading.” Rather than challenging their data, he reframed it. He pointed out that the absolute number of Blacks and Latinos arrested for possession of marijuana had gone down under his administration, but he failed to mention that the percentages by race were unchanged. He also attacked the DPA as “a group committed to legalization,” which is irrelevant.

A marijuana arrest can interfere with a young person’s ability to get a job, go to college, take out a loan, or even find a place to live. There is no evidence that eliminating these arrests has any negative impact on public safety. In fact, there seems to be widespread public support for legalization of marijuana, and there is no justification for racially discriminatory marijuana enforcement. Yet NYPD seems to have considerable ability to resist these policy changes.

You may also be interested in reading:

In Perspective

Racial Profiling in Preschool

Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule