Black Communities: Overpoliced for Petty Crimes, Ignored for Major Ones
Imagine that you are - if you are not - a reasonably well-off white high school student in a reasonably quiet Midwestern town. It’s not a great place. The steel mill shut down a while back; there’s not much work anymore; there’s always been weed, and meth and pills have been creeping in; and it’s always been a tough town; you and your friends have had their share of fights, just like your father did, and his father. But it, and you, are pretty much OK. You run with your friends, do OK in school, party some but not as hard as some others, hunt in the fall with your dad.
Then imagine that the cops sat you and your family down and said that they weren’t going to do anything anymore except cause you trouble. We’re going to double down on the weed and the rest, they say; expect to get stopped when you walk down the street and pulled over every chance we get. You probably didn’t know that riding your bike on the sidewalk is illegal, but it is, and now we’re going to arrest you for it. If you’re not on your own block, in front of your own house, we’ll arrest you for trespassing, and if you don’t like it you can explain it to the judge a week later when you get out of holding and get arraigned. If we see more than three of you and your friends at a time, we’ll prone you out on the street in front of your girlfriends and cuff you while we run a warrant check. We think you’re all scum, they tell you, and you get no slack at all any more.
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Imagine how the violence would spiral; there’d be bodies in the streets in no time. And then, if you can, imagine how you’d feel listening to the folks in the next town over watch the carnage and talk about how it’s all because you have a terrible family and weren’t raised right, and there’s dope so you’re all drug dealers and we all know drug dealers have to shoot each other, and shooting each other is just cultural for people like you, and you and all your friends are vicious, evil super-predators with no regard for human life.
And then imagine how you’d feel as the cops looked at you, and your family, and your friends, and your whole town, and said, we knew you were scum.
You’d be experiencing what families in stressed black neighborhoods have experienced forever - very high rates of arrest for minor offenses white folks routinely get away with, and shockingly low arrest rates for serious violent crime.
I came across this via Jenée Desmond-Harris at Vox. Anyone interested in the topic should really read the whole thing.
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