Racial Disparity In Law Enforcement

Racial discrimination is where an employer commits race discrimination when it makes job decisions based on race or when it adopts seemingly neutral job policies that disproportionately affect members of a particular race. Federal and most state laws prohibit workplace race discrimination. Title VII -- the federal law that prohibits racial discrimination of the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 work in concert to ensure that each resident’s chances in the pursuit of happiness are not damaged by their race. Although it is prohibited I believe that it is still an issue especially within the criminal justice system. I will support my answer with an ample amount of facts regarding racial discrimination within the criminal justice system.

Racial profiling is a very prevalent issue within the criminal justice system that is quite controversial, but there is a significant number of evidence that shows that racial profiling has been present since the 1600’s and continues to be a significant issue. Racial profiling is evident in the criminal justice system in various ways such as in interrogations, jury selection, misleading statistics, stops, and immigration laws. Racial profiling within interrogations and jury selection can be seen with the Brandley v. Keeshan case. Racial profiling within statistics can be seen in instances where the numbers focus on arrests and incarcerations that do not necessarily mean a crime was committed. Stops are seen as evidence showing racial profiling with a personal experience, and lastly, immigration laws are seen as showing racial profiling by the encounter of a Mexican American women had with an officer in Arizona.

In this article, Robert, April, and Jorge (2010) acknowledges previous research reports on this topic and reveals that race, and racial patterns have found their way in involvement of crime. However, Robert, April, and Jorge (2010) argue that there is no significant proof that there are meaningful racial disparities in the legal systems. Although some literatures provide research on the existence of racial profiling by police, in imprisonment, and sentencing, other researchers report no significant racial disparities in the legal systems (Black and Reiss, 1970; Pilivian and Briar, 1964). However, other researchers report on ample racial disparities based on race. These researches are controversial because the size of the differences in such reports tends to bring up the question of meaningfulness of the differences observed (Wilbanks, 1987).

Social issues are dealt with every day, everywhere in our society. Issues like immigration all the way to climate change. As our world evolves the number of social issues only continue to accumulate. Racial disparity is something that is in every aspect of our society. A repetitive social issue is minorities being targeted in the criminal justice system. Minorities, in specific African Americans receive unequal treatment and punishment in the criminal justice system this causes a split in our society, racist outburst, and million of unjustified incarcerations affecting the environment millennials grow in, and the economy as money is being spent where there should be no need for it.

What is racism? Racism is defined as discrimination toward someone’s race or religion etc. As we know today, this is a big issue, especially in United State. This is important to me because it does not matter what skin color you have or what religion you believe in. All that matters are that a person follows the law. Police officers, for example, they are supposed to use the power that they have for the bad people, people that do crimes and our threat to our society. Using violence against people that haven't done any threat to our society is wrong. In Sweden there is some racism, but not to the extent that black people will get harassed because of their skin color. In Sweden, the law is for everyone and whoever breaks the law will get the punishment they deserve. We all know that it is always two side of a story for example what happened to Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. Michael Brown was robbing a grocery store. The police officer stated that “He shot Brown after the teen attacked him”, While brown’s family said, “Brown was surrendering when he was shot dead.” You are always going to hear two different sides but the justice will find out who is the guilty one and who is the victim.

Research focusing on the calculation of racial disparities in police outcomes has generally examined police traffic stops and the follow up police activities, such as, citations, search and warnings. Review of these studies suggests that calculation methods of racial disparity vary from one study to another; however, majority of those studies employed population as a baseline measure or benchmarking variable (Withrow, 2002; Smith & Petrocelli, 2001; Withrow & Williams, 2015). Early studies using population as a baseline measure to compare disproportionate traffic stop counts found substantial racial disparities (Lamberth, 1996; Verniero & Zoubek, 1999). Studies later have begun to discuss that

The judicial system in America has always endured much skepticism as to whether or not there is racial profiling amongst arrests. The stop and frisk policy of the NYPD has caused much controversy and publicity since being applied because of the clear racial disparity in stops. Now the question remains; Are cops being racially biased when choosing whom to stop or are they just targeting “high crime” neighborhoods, thus choosing minorities by default? This paper will examine the history behind stop and frisk policies. Along with referenced facts about the Stop and Frisk Policy, this paper will include and discuss methods and findings of my own personal field research.

Less is known about the extent of discrimination at the arrest stage, in part because underlying rates of criminal activity by race cannot be easily assessed. Some evidence comes from comparing the race distribution of offenders derived from victims’ surveys with the racial composition of individuals arrested for the same crime. Two studies have found that these distributions are roughly comparable for many violent crimes.

“The system is not fair. Institutional racism is alive and well in the juvenile justice system as it is in the criminal justice system, due to racial disparity and bias in the court room” (Jones, Bridgett). This is a statement that plagues many people involved in the justice systems. There are huge racial disparities throughout the world. Post-Slavery: the early development of the Race/Crime Connection, Profiling: Racializing possible cause, and differential bias involvement as well as institutional racism. We can work on having better policies and procedures driven into police practices and we need to make sure people of color are not excluded from juries to stop most of the disparity.

Law enforcement officials often confront situations where it’s an almost certainty that illegal activities are taking place despite not having sufficient resources to investigate every possible perpetrator. Research on race and vehicle stops by police show that African American drivers are disproportionately stopped in traffic by police for driving violations (Kowalski & Lundman, 2007). The reason is because law enforcement officials use characterizations or

The existence of racial disparity and structural inequality within the criminal justice system renders the concept of true justice for all unobtainable. The statistics of convictions and prison sentences by race definitely support the concept that discrimination is a problem in the justice system as well as the insignificantly number of minority judges and lawyers. There are a multitude of circumstances that influence these statistics according to the “Central Eight” criminogenic risk factors. The need for programs and methods to effectively deter those at risk individuals has never been greater and the lack of such programs is costing society in countless ways.

The research problem in Black and Hispanic Men Perceived to Be Large Are at Increased Risk for Police Frisk, Search, and Force, is one in which the bigger or larger the defendants are at risk for experiencing police force mistreatment of racial profiling, with the black and Hispanic men being more likely to experience excessive force than Caucasian men across the same dimensions (Milner, George, & Allison, 2016, p. 1). The particular design of this study was a is a quasi-experimental design, the data-gathering strategy of this study was simple and straightforward; 3 million cases from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) Database, from the following years, 2006–2013 (Milner et al., 2016, p. 1).

Ever since the late 1970 's profiling was associated with a method of spotting and stopping drug traffickers. The profiling provided not only a quick way to see evidence of concealment in the vehicle, but included age and race characteristics of possible drivers (Data Collection Resource Center). The controversy is over whether or not there are a disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics involved with law enforcement that reflects police racism or is it merely the outcome of disproportionate minority crime (MacDonald). MacDonald reported the high rates of minority stops and arrests do not accurately reveal racism was the cause. In the past

I chose this topic because the certain police officers that had passed away in the line of duty had served for so long which made this subject so interesting. After looking at multiple tables I have come to the conclusion that the southern part of the United States has had the most casualties from the years from 2006 to 2015. As I was reading this article, one thing that caught my eye was that there were more accidental deaths of police officers in the south. Through this I can concur that the south possible could have the most problems with police officers between 2006 and 2015. The south has the most related casualties to police officers which shows that the other parts of the US don’t have problems with these officers.

These tests are applied to two datasets from the Florida State Highway Patrol. The traffic dataset consists of all stops and searches conducted on all Florida Highways from January 2000 to November 2001, including the race of the motorist, whether a search was conducted, and the ID of the trooper making the stop. Model relies on the assumption that all troopers face the same population of motorists. However, the data shows that this is not the case. So, the authors use a reweighted sample to test for racial bias. From this test, the author could conclude that white officers search the highest percentage of the motorists they stop, and black officers search the lowest percentage, regardless of the race the motorist. For all officers, the percentage of black motorists searched is higher than Hispanic motorists, which in turn is higher than white motorists. In turn, all officers have the highest success rates for searches of white motorists, followed by black and then Hispanic motorists. This paper concluded that troopers of different races do not exhibit relative racial prejudice.