Tag Archives: police

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

Why “Bad Dudes” Look So Bad

Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, ,

A 2016 Washington Post analysis showed that Black Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be shot and killed by police officers than White Americans, and that unarmed Blacks are 5 times as likely to be shot dead than unarmed Whites. While there are many explanations for this finding, there is little support for the knee-jerk conservative response that attributes this racial disparity to the fact that Blacks commit more crimes. An analysis of the U. S. Police Shooting Database at the county level found no relationship between the racial bias in police shootings and either the overall crime rate or the race-specific crime rate. Thus, this racial bias is not explainable as a response to local crime rates.

When police officers shoot an unarmed Black teenager or adult, they are not likely to be convicted or even prosecuted if they claim to have felt themselves threatened by the victim. This suggests that it’s important to look at factors that affect whether police officers feel threatened. A study by Phillip Goff and others found that participants overestimated the ages of teenaged Black boys by 4.5 years compared to White or Latino boys, and rated them as less innocent than White or Latino boys when they committed identical crimes. While age may be related to perceived threat, the present study by John Paul Wilson of Montclair State University and his colleagues is more relevant, since it looks at the relationship between race and the perceived physical size and strength of young men.

The researchers were extremely thorough. They conducted seven studies involving over 950 online participants. Unless otherwise specified, participants were shown color facial photographs of 45 Black and 45 White high school football players who were balanced for overall height and weight. In the first study, the Black athletes were judged to be taller and heavier than the White athletes. Furthermore, when asked to match each photo with one of the bodies shown below, they judged the young Black men to be more muscular, or, as they put it, more “formidable.”

In a second study, participants were asked to imagine that they were in a fight with the person in the photograph, and were asked how capable he would be of physically harming them. The young Black men were seen as capable of inflicting greater harm.

In the third study, the authors examined the possibility that racial prejudice might predict these physical size and harm judgments. A fairly obvious measure of prejudice was used. Participants were asked to complete “feeling thermometers” indicating their favorability toward White and Black people. This measure of prejudice was only weakly associated with the participants’ judgments of Black-White differences in harm capability and not at all with Black-White differences in harm perception.

Up to this point, Black participants were excluded. However, the fourth study compared Black and White participants. Both Blacks and Whites saw the young Black men as more muscular, though the effect was larger for Whites. Only White participants saw the Black men as more capable of inflicting harm. Apparently Black participants subscribe the the size stereotype, but not to the stereotype about threat.

The fifth study was an attempt to apply these results to the dilemmas faced by police officers. Once again, both Blacks and Whites participated. They were asked to imagine that the young men in the photographs had behaved aggressively but were unarmed. How appropriate would it have been for the police to use force? White participants saw the police as more justified in using force against the young Black men than against the young White men. For the Black participants, there was no difference.

Previous research had shown that Black men who have an Afrocentric appearance—that is, who have dark skin and facial structures typical of African-Americans—are treated differently than Black men who are less prototypical. For example, in a laboratory simulation, participants are more likely to “shoot” a Black man if he has Afrocentric features, and a Black man convicted of murder is more likely to be sentenced to death if he is prototypical. The sixth study showed that young Black men whose facial features are prototypical are seen as more formidable and the police are seen as more justified in using force against them. Furthermore, this is true even when participants are shown photos of young White men. That is, White men with darker skin and facial features resembling Black men are seen as more muscular than other White men, and participants believe the police are more justified in using force against them.

In the final study, participants were shown the exact same photographs of men’s bodies with the head cropped off, but they were given additional information indicating the man was either White or Black. The photos were color-inverted to make the man’s race difficult to detect. The man’s race was indicated either by a Black or White face said to be the man in the photo, or a stereotypically Black or White first name. Results indicated that the very same bodies were seen as taller and heavier when the man was presumed to be Black than when he was presumed to be White.

You might be wondering whether Black and White men actually differ in size. Data from the Center for Disease Control shows that the average Black and White male has exactly the same weight, and that Whites are on average 1 cm taller. Therefore, when participants see Black men as larger, they are not generalizing from their real world experience.

These studies are important in explaining why police officers feel more threatened by young Black men than young White men, and why jurors are more likely to see the killing of young Blacks as justified. It may help to explain why no charges were brought against a Milwaukee police officer who shot Dontre Hamilton 14 times. The officer described Hamilton as “muscular” and “most definitely would have overpowered me or pretty much any officer I can think of.” Hamilton was 5’7” and weighed 169 lbs.

It is important to realize that the results of these studies are not readily explained by conscious race prejudice. This size estimation bias is probably automatic and unconscious, and is most likely to affect behavior when a police officer must make a split-second decision. The fact that officers are likely to be found not guilty of using excessive force against a Black victim if they testify that they felt threatened is troubling, since it suggests that implicit racial bias can be used successfully as a defense when charged with a violent crime.

You may also be interested in reading:

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Teaching Bias, Part 1

Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule

A Theory in Search of Evidence

Media, Politics, ,

On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an editorial headlined “Murder on the Rise.” It states that the homicide rate is up this year “in more than 30 major American cities”—but not including Pittsburgh. It repeats the “theory” that this change is due to the “Ferguson effect,” which argues that police, facing criticism from African-American activists, have been “less aggressive in patrolling problem neighborhoods.” It concludes that a return to the “bad old days” of high homicide rates is unacceptable and that law enforcement and the Justice Department “must bring their resources to bear to figure this out.”

The statistics they cite come from an August 31 New York Times article whose authors, Monica Davey and Mitch Smith, surveyed an unspecified number of cities and reported that at least 35 of them have seen increases in “murder, violent crimes, or both.” The article is accompanied by a chart showing increases in the homicide rate of between 4% and 76% in ten cities. But not all cities have seen more killing. They mention three cities where murders have not increased.

There are several problems with the Times article. First of all, their statistic has neither a numerator nor a denominator. Since they lump murder together with other violent crimes, the authors don’t specify exactly how many cities reported increases in murders. More importantly, they fail to report how many cities they surveyed—a critical point, since if the actual homicide rate is unchanged, half of cities can be expected to show increases just by chance. Finally, they give no summary statistic indicating whether the overall homicide rate in the cities surveyed is up or down, by what percentage, and whether the change is statistically significant. This is important since homicide rates in many cities fluctuate quite a bit from year to year, and the number of violent crimes was unusually low in 2014.

The authors had to conduct their own survey because there are no up-to-date, authoritative data on homicides in the nation’s cities. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which provide city-level crime data, do not come out until the following year. This lack of hard data allows people to claim that the crime rate is either increasing or decreasing, whichever their ideology leads them to prefer, based on incomplete samples.

Even if the homicide rate has increased significantly, there is nothing to connect it to the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, one year ago. To their credit, the Times mentions the research of criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who found that homicides in the St. Louis area peaked before Michael Brown was shot, and who states that there is no evidence of a “Ferguson effect.” Unfortunately, this finding is buried deep in the article and is surrounded by stories about specific murders and theories which lack empirical support.

A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)
A man holds his grandson at a rally protesting the death of Walter Scott in Charleston, NC. (Photo: AP/David Goldman)

Three days later, the Washington Post got into the act in an article about the shooting death of Illinois police officer Charles Gliniewicz. Although there is no evidence that race or anti-police sentiment played a role in his death, Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police and several other law enforcement sources hold the Black Lives Matter movement responsible for what they imply is an increase in the killing of police officers. One of them blames the “dangerous national rhetoric that is out there today.” One Black activist who disputes these claims is also quoted.

Buried in the middle of this article is a critical fact. The National Law Enforcment Officers Memorial Fund reports that 24 police officers have been killed by suspects so far this year, “the second lowest number in the past five years.” Yet according to a September 1 Rasmussen poll, 58% of likely voters believe “there is a war on police in America today,” while just 27% disagree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates criticized the Times article as an example of “false equivalence,” since the authors don’t make a clear distinction between opinions and facts. Unless they read the story carefully, readers could easily conclude that “there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it.” (The author of the Post-Gazette editorial seems to have fallen into this trap.) This same argument applies to the Post article.

Social scientists refer to this journalistic practice as false balancing. It’s found, for example, in articles about climate change which imply that scientists are evenly divided as to whether the climate is changing, and which fail to evaluate the quality of the evidence each side presents. Cautious journalists have been transformed into stenographers, faithfully reporting what everyone says but never examining whether what they say makes sense. Paul Krugman once suggested that if candidates of one party said the Earth is flat and and the other party said it’s a sphere, the newspaper headline would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”

As of this writing, at least 820 people have been killed by the police so far this year. African-Americans, with 13.2% of the population, account for one-third of these deaths. For those deaths in which the victim is unarmed, the Black percentage is even higher. While it is clear that major changes in policing are needed, law enforcement is digging in its heels and fighting back with theories such as the “Ferguson effect.” By failing to make it clear that claims of a “war on police” are without empirical support, the corporate media play into the hands of those who are trying to convince the public to sacrifice the civil liberties of African-Americans in exchange for an illusory increase in public safety.

Update (9/11/15):

police1

The American Enterprise Institute published this chart showing the number of gun-related police deaths per capita from 1870 to the present. As they point out, exaggerating the danger to police has been used as a justification for the increasing militarization of U. S. law enforcement.

You may also be interested in reading:

White People Don’t Riot:  A Manual of Style For Ambitious Young Journalists

A Downside of Police Body Cameras

Social psychology, ,

The shooting death by police of Gilbert Flores, a Latino man who bystanders claim had raised his hands in surrender, has San Antonio authorites rushing to equip their police with body cameras. Fortunately, this possible murder was captured by at least two observers with cell phones. As of this writing, it’s not clear which version of the incident the videos will support. This is only one of countless recent police-civilian encouters in which videotapes either made a difference or would have been helpful.

By a body camera, I’m referring to a small camera that clips onto an officer’s uniform or eyeglasses and records audio and video of the officer’s interactions with the public. Although I am generally opposed to warrantless surveillance, in this case the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) refers to body cameras as a “win-win” because, if properly used, they can protect the public against abuse of power by the police while protecting the police from false accusations of brutality. Of course, there must be policies in place to prevent the police from selectively recording only certain interactions or parts of interactions, or from editing tapes after the fact. The ACLU recommends a set of policies to protect the public from this and other abuses of the technology.

However, there is a drawback of the use of this technology that so far seems to have escaped the notice of the mass media. A body camera records an interaction from a particular point of view—that of the police officer. There is evidence from social psychology that visual perspective can alter the salience of people and their actions, and this can affect the conclusions that people draw.

tayler-and-fiske-1975-fae_edited-1In a 1975 experiment, Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske staged a conversation between two people, and placed observers at various locations around the room, as indicated in the diagram. Afterwards, the observers were asked to rate the amount of causal influence that each speaker exerted during the conversation. The results showed that the observers attributed greater causality to the person they were facing. Observers C and F saw Actor B as more influential, Observers D and A favored Actor A, and Observers B and E, who could see both actors equally well, tended to see them as equally important. This phenomenon is sometimes called illusory causation. People attribute greater causality to a person simply because he or she is more salient or noticeable than other people.

When an interaction is videotaped from different locations, the effect is called camera perspective bias. Daniel Lassiter and Audrey Irvine staged an interrogation in which a detective questioned a suspect, with the suspect eventually confessing to a crime. Three cameras simultaneously filmed the interaction, one looking over the detective’s shoulder, another over the suspect’s shoulder, and a third from the side with both the detective and the suspect equally visible. Observers were shown one of the three tapes and asked how voluntary the confession was. The confession was judged to be most voluntary—that is, caused by the suspect—when the camera was focused on the suspect and least voluntary—caused by the detective—when it was focused on the detective.

Lassiter and his colleagues have replicated this result several times, including under quite realistic conditions. In one study, they staged a mock trial and played jurors a videotaped confession filmed from one of the three perspectives. Not only was the confession seen as more voluntary when the focus was on the suspect, participants were more likely to find him guilty and recommend a longer sentence. Most police departments record confessions with the camera focused on the suspect.

These studies have implications for the police use of body cameras. The videotapes become important when there is an altercation between a police officer and a civilian suspect leading to some adverse outcome, such as the suspect being shot. Observers of the video must assign responsiblity under circumstances that may be quite ambiguous. When the camera is focued on the suspect, he or she will be more likely to be seen to have caused the bad outcome. Any aggressive behavior by the suspect is captured by the camera, while nonverbal behavior by the officer that is obnoxious or threatening can go unseen and become difficult to prove. The body camera is not a neutral observer of the interaction. It is biased in favor of the police officer.

A dashcam—a camera mounted on the dashboard of a patrol car—can  provide a more objective view of a police-civilian encounter, provided that both participants are visible. So too can a video taken by an observer with a cell phone. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman recommends that everyone carry a cell phone and record every encounter they have with the police. He gives an example of a black motorist who used this tactic to embarrass a policeman who was harassing him. However, this approach is not without its risks, as police have been known to charge people who try to videotape them with a crime. If you wind up in jail or in a hospital, the fact that you had a legal right to record the interaction may provide little comfort.

I’m in favor of police body cameras. They’re a clear improvement over the status quo. However, camera perspective bias needs to be more widely publicized and better understood.