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John,
Today, The Sentencing Project released a new report, “One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing,” which interrogates the large footprint of policing—particularly of Black Americans—as a failed response to racial disparities in serious crimes. The report also provides recommendations for right-sizing policing in the United States.
Specifically, this report finds:
*
Police
officers’
reliance
on
millions
of
minor
traffic
stops
annually
as
a
pretext
to
investigate
drivers
for
criminal
activity
disproportionately
impacts
Black
and
Latinx
drivers.
Among
those
they
pull
over,
police
are
more
likely
to
search
Black
(6.2%)
and
Latinx
drivers
(9.2%)
than
whites
(3.6%).
But
police
are
often
less
likely
to
find
drugs
or
weapons
among
the
Black
and
Latinx
drivers
that
they
search,
compared
to
whites.


*
Black
and
white
Americans
use
illicit
drugs
at
roughly
similar
rates,
but
about
one
in
four
people
arrested
for
drug
law
violations
are
Black,
although
Black
people
make
up
14%
of
the
U.S.
population.


*
Black
Americans
were
9.3
times
as
likely
as
whites
to
be
homicide
victims
in
2020,
American
Indians
were
4.3
times
as
likely,
and
Latinx
Americans
were
1.9
times
as
likely.
Since
homicide
is
generally
an
intra-racial
crime,
these
figures
correspond
to
higher
rates
of
homicide
offending
among
these
communities
of
color,
which
is
attributable
to
spatially-concentrated
urban
poverty
resulting
from
longstanding
and
ongoing
segregation,
discrimination,
and
disinvestment.
This report finds that a high volume of police contact fails to address the higher rates of serious violent offending and victimization among communities of color. In fact, it sometimes exacerbates these problems by reducing trust in law enforcement and diverting resources that could be better invested in communities.
We recommend right-sizing policing through reforms such as decriminalizing and legalizing drug use and removing police from non-public safety traffic stops and instead investing in universal access to effective drug treatment and community-based violence prevention programs.
READ THE REPORT [[link removed]]
The report is the second installment in The Sentencing Project’s “One in Five” series examining racial inequities in America’s criminal legal system. Click here to read the first report. [[link removed]]
[[link removed]] Nazgol Ghandnoosh
Co-Director of Research
Email: [email protected] [[email protected]]
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