Driving While Black

 

I keep going back in time these days - deja vu they call it.  Perhaps it is because I have just written a book on the history of criminal justice and taught a class on the subject this past semester.  I keep reading studies on the subject of racial bias within the criminal (and juvenile) justice system back in the 19th century, in the 1920s and 1930s, in the 1960s and 1970s, and then again in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s; the most recent being a 1999 report about "racial profiling" and other forms of racial bias from police stops all the way through to sentencing (especially the imposition of the death penalty).

This past October this controversy hit the local media with the report of three young males here in Las Vegas who were stopped for what has become known as "DWB" (the initials standing for "driving while black").  Curiously, these incidents have all but disappeared from local media scrutiny. (It has not escaped national attention, for a recent Gallup poll found that three-fourths of young black males believe they have been stopped just because they are black.)  Obviously, incidents like these are not unusual.  (I wonder what if such a story would disappear it the same thing happened to a white youth whose family is wealthy or has political connections?) 

I have repeatedly heard the same stories from minority students of mine. Without exception, my African-American students who come from Los Angeles, have told me that when visiting friends or relatives in that area have learned never to ride around in a car with more than two people.  Why? Because, they say, three or more will fit the "profile" of a "gang" and you will be stopped by the police for a multitude of reasons, none of which will be considered as "probable cause" in any court of law.

I've heard other examples, such as a former UNLV football star (also a student of mine) who was stopped and questioned at McCarren Airport one night a few years ago because he fit the "profile" of a "drug runner":  he was a young African-American male wearing a red jogging suit (with Rebel logos all over).  This kind of example hit the headlines a few years ago when baseball hall-of-famer Joe Morgan had the same experience.  He took the police to court and won.  How many others have never made the headlines one may wonder.

Are these "isolated incidents" or merely the proverbial "tip of the iceberg"?  I do see a pattern here.  My suspicions are reinforced when I see from the volumes of research reports where racial minorities are arrested, prosecuted and sentenced in numbers far out of proportion to their percentage in the general population.  The claim that the "current offense" or "prior record" is more important than race per se just doesn't wash any more, especially when we consider how easy it is for a minority to have a "prior record" - often for merely being in the same neighborhood where there are "gangs" or being stopped for "DWB." 

We can blame a lot of this on the "war on drugs" because the police lock-ups, local jails, courthouses, and prisons are filled to the max with drug offenders, most of whom are racial minorities.  The incarceration rate for African-Americans is now about eight times greater than whites. In fact, while African-Americans constitute only around 12% of the U.S. population and about 13% of all monthly drug users (and their rate of illegal drug use is roughly the same as for whites), they represent 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession and 74% of those sentenced to prison on drug charges.  Drug arrest rates for minorities went from under 600 per 100,000 in 1980 to over 1500 in 1990, while for whites they essentially remained the same. (I have more statistics like these if the reader wants to pursue this further.)