Policing African Americans

Following are excerpts from: Angela J. Davis, Policing the Black Man (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017).
p. xiv - In 2011, black boys represented the greatest percent of children placed in juvenile detention -- 903 black boys per 100,000, compared to 125 black girls. Black boys were 9.3 times more likely to spend time in juvenile detention than white boys.

p. xv. - Over half the students arrested at schools in the U.S. and referred to the criminal justice system are black or Hispanic. Blacks represent 16 percent of student enrollment but represent 27 percent referred to law enforcement and 31 percent subjected to in-school arrest. African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than whites, and 49 percent of black men can be expected to be arrested at least once by age 33, compared to 44 percent for Hispanics and 38 percent of white men.

Under New York's stop-and-frisk practice, blacks and Hispanics were stopped almost 10 times their percentage of the population. Black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. Between 2010 and 2012, black boys aged 15 through 19 were killed at the rate of 31.17 per million, vs. 1.47 per million for white boys of the same age group. African Americans killed were twice as likely to be unarmed as whites.

By the end of 2015, black men constituted 34 percent of the U.S. prison population. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime. Data collected by the U.S. Sentencing Commission between December 2007 and 2011 revealed that black men in federal prisons received sentences 19.5 percent longer than white men sentenced for the same crime.

p. xvi - As of 2014, the national death row population was approximately 42 percent black vs. a black population of only 13.6 percent.

p. 11 - "Convict leasing, the practice of 'selling' the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests  for state profit, utilized the criminal justice system for the economic exploitation and political disempowerment of black people. State legislators passed discriminatory laws, or 'Black Codes,' which created new criminal offenses such as 'vagrancy' and 'loitering.' "

p. 16 - The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950 in just 12 Southern states, This is at least 800 more than previously reported.

p. 20 - More than 8 in 10 U.S. lynchings between 1899 and 1918 occurred in the South and more than 8 in 10 of the more than 1,400 executions carried out in the U.S. have been in the South.

p. 41 - A 2003 study concluded that the "police cling to an institutional  definition that stresses crime control and not prevention," and police organizations "have not been radically or even significantly altered in the era of community policing and problem-oriented policing."

p. 50 - When white respondents were asked to estimate the proportion of burglaries, drug sales and juvenile crimes committed by African Americans, they underestimated by 20 to 30 percent.

p. 67 - The presence of school resource officers (SROs) has increased arrests for low-level offenses, including non-serious assaults typical of an adolescent school fight or disorderly conduct. Discipline and rule enforcement is thus relinquished to police.

p. 75 - Neither resistance nor avoidance has been particularly effective in preventing abuses and rectifying injustice against black youth.

p. 140 - Slave patrols were the first uniquely American form of policing and the first publicly funded police agencies.

p. 155 - "Understanding implicit bias is essential to identifying and eliminating racial bias in policing."

p. 195 - According to a 2015 study by the Women Donor Network, of 2,437 elected prosecutors, 95 percent were white and 79 percent were white men. Only 4 percent of all elected prosecutors were men of color.  Excluding Virginia and Mississippi, only 1 percent of all elected prosecutors are African Americans.

p. 266 - The centerpiece of the Supreme Court's approach to anti-discrimination protections has been to confine the definition of illegal discrimination to those acts that are motivated by intentional racial animus.

p. 268 - The Supreme Court has created an imaginary world where discrimination does not exist unless it was consciously intended.

p. 271 - Statistics, such as using the death penalty in a discriminatory manner, are not accepted as sufficient evidence to prove discrimination.

p. 272 - Justice William Brennan called dismissal of racial disparities as "a fear of too much justice."

p. 277 - "But what constitutes 'reasonableness' should  exact even more scrutiny in the context of police killings of black people, given the phenomenon of implicit bias."

p. 301 - The total penal population in the United States stands at 2.2 million, although the U.S. has just 5 percent of world population -- the U.S. has 23 percent of the world's incarcerated population.

p. 308 - A survey of 18 jurisdictions revealed that African Americans represented 39 percent of the prison population, but 47 percent of those in administrative segregation units.

p. 310 - A researcher found that incarceration was associated with a 40 percent reduction in annual earnings after release from prison.

In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that 3.6 percent of all minor children in the U.S. had a parent in prison of jail, up from 0.8 percent in 1980. The percentage is 11.4 for all black children.

p. 311 -  In neighborhoods in Washington D.C., neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration had only 62 men for every 100 women, vs. 94 to 100 in low-incarceration neighborhoods.

p. 313 - "The causes, scope, and consequences of mass incarceration have contributed to a  cycle of poverty and violence, producing a novel kind of embedded social inequality that prevents the full participation of blacks in American social and political life."