Solutions to global issues

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Writing Activity 4 : Final Draft

Shalanda Moore

ENG 215 - Research & Writing

Dr. Mary Rose Kasraie

September 1, 2019

Prosecutors on aggregate don’t seem to seek the death penalty more for black people than white people, though there are some gaping disparities in a few states and in some counties. Instead, the real racial bias when it comes to the death penalty pertains to the race of the victim. Killers of black people rarely get death sentences. White killers of black people get death sentences even less frequently. And far and away, the type of murder most likely to bring a death sentence is a black man who kills a white woman. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports 208,000 people are in state prisons for drug offenses. Of this number, 32 percent are white, and 68 percent are African American or Hispanic. The link to other forms of profiling suggests that there is something scientific and efficient about racial profiling. The reality is very different. Race is a social construct; not knowable by sight. Racial profiles are both over-inclusive in the sense that many, indeed most, of the people who fit into the category are entirely innocent, and under-inclusive in that many other criminals or terrorists who do not fit the profile will escape police attention. Racial profiling also faces the problems of predictability and evasion; the more predictable police profiles become, the easier it is for perpetrators to adapt to circumvent the profile. The ineffectiveness of racial profiling is illustrated by consistently low hit or arrest rates for policing actions based on racial profiling. There is surprising consistency in data coming out of the USA, the UK and Europe demonstrating similar ‘hit' or arrest rates across racial groups. In several studies, ethnic minorities are less likely to be arrested or have contraband or other ‘seizable' evidence found following a search. This refutes the proposition that minorities are more likely to be involved in crime and illustrates that racial profiling represents an ineffective use of police resources. Narrow definitions of racial profiling describe situations where actions are based solely on the basis of a person's race or ethnicity. In practice, this has allowed police forces to deny the existence of racial profiling, where activities are legally justifiable but nonetheless racially biased such as the use of pretext traffic stops. Broader definitions recognise that decisions are usually made on a number of factors including race. This wider definition reflects the fact that racial profiling may occur irrespective of whether this is a deliberate policy of targeted minority groups or routine institutional practices. Patterns of profiling can also be seen in discriminatory treatment after a stop has taken place, such decisions to go on to search, more intrusive searches, citations and arrests. Racial profiling is the use by the police of generalisations based on race, ethnicity, religion or national origin, rather than individual behaviour, specific suspect descriptions or intelligence. It is used as the basis for suspicion in directing discretionary law enforcement actions such as stops, identity checks, questioning, or searches among other tactics. Put simply, police officers are racially profiling when they view people as suspicious because of who they are, what they look like, or where they pray, rather than what they have done. It is often confused with ‘criminal profiling,' which relies on forms of statistical categorisation of groups of people according to identifiable characteristics believed to correlate with certain behaviours, such as serial killer or hijacker profiles. The reliability of these tools is questionable but racial profiling in particular rests on flawed notions about race and crime. It assumes that someone's race is knowable from their appearance and that there is a consistent and statistically significant relationship between race and propensity to commit crime. Denying the right to vote to an entire class of citizens is deeply problematic to a democratic society and counterproductive to effective reentry. The federal government should allow Americans to vote regardless of their conviction status, and certainly after they have concluded their sentences. States should also allow the full democratic participation of their citizens. Government officials should also revise policies that serve no public safety function but impose collateral consequences on people with criminal convictions—such as in the realms of employment, education, housing, and in the social safety net—and encourage similar reforms in the private sector. Racial profiling also comes with heavy costs for those targeted. Profiling exacts a high price on individuals, groups, and communities that are singled out for disproportionate police attention. For the individual singled out, stopped and detained the experience, often of frequent repeat encounters with the police, can be frightening and demeaning. Racial profiling stigmatises whole groups, reinforcing and fuelling racial tensions and contributing to the over-representation of ethnic minorities in other parts of the criminal justice system. Racial profiling damages police-community relations, undermining trust and confidence and deterring cooperation. The source of such disparities is deeper and more systemic than explicit racial discrimination. The United States in effect operates two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color. The wealthy can access a vigorous adversary system replete with constitutional protections for defendants. Yet the experiences of poor and minority defendants within the criminal justice system often differ substantially from that model due to a number of factors, each of which contributes to the overrepresentation of such individuals in the system. As former Georgetown Law Professor David Cole states in his book No Equal Justice, The damage that racial profiling can do is slowly being recognised. In the USA, the Obama Administration convened a task force to explore policing and community relations in the wake of police shootings and protests. In March this year, the task force recommended independent criminal investigations into police shootings, the adoption of policies to address racial profiling, including collection and sharing of data on stops, frisks, summonses, arrests and crimes, the demilitarisation of policing and relaxing the police approach to mass demonstrations. Here the Home Secretary, Theresa May, initiated a process of reforms around stop and search in 2013. This included strengthening the Code of Practice governing the use of the powers, training for officers, with focus on ‘unconscious bias' and the ‘Best use of Stop and Search Scheme', a voluntary scheme that binds police to wider recording of stop and search and its outcomes, introduces a lay observer scheme, improved complaints mechanisms and limits the use of controversial section 60 power. Yet, two years on, a recent review found that stops are still unrecorded, guidance is lacking, and disproportionality remains too high (Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, 2015). The USA has a long history of racist policing, rooted in slavery and the enforcement of segregationist ‘Jim Crow' laws. The current understanding of racial profiling developed out of the ‘drug courier profile' that was created in the mid-1980s by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in an effort to combat interstate drug trafficking under the rubric of the ‘war on drugs.' The DEA trained local law enforcement officials to look for ‘indicators', based on a drug courier profile, that included race as well as behavioural clues such as nervousness or the use of rental vehicles. There was no evidence that that African-Americans and Latinos/as were more likely to use or transport drugs than their white counterparts, yet the DEA training materials described and pictured predominately minority faces. The targeting of minorities for traffic stops, searches and fines thus became common practice and embedded in policing policy and structure in police forces across the country. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, the ‘war on terror' extended the practice through aggressive enforcement of immigration laws, intrusive security screening in airports and removal from planes targeted at Muslims or those perceived to be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent. Here are 18 examples of racism in parts of different stages of the system. Taken together, the racism in each of these steps accelerates the process of incarceration of African American and Latino males. Together, they demonstrate that racism may well be the biggest crime in the criminal legal system. UPDATE (Apr. 10, 2019): Since I first published this piece in September 2018, I’ve compiled another 21 studies on race in the criminal justice system, listed below. As before, if you know of something I’ve missed or are aware of a forthcoming study, please let me know via email. The United States should fully fund and staff indigent defense agencies through an appropriate mix of local, state, and federal resources. The federal government should increase support for training and technical assistance for indigent defense, and document shortcomings of jurisdictions that fail to meet established bar association standards for caseloads and professional training. The use of force by police and law enforcement agencies has contributed to a widening rift in police/community relations. The brutalizing of Abner Louima while in police custody in New York and the police shooting of a West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, in the vestibule of his New York apartment building have raised public awareness of a long-simmering concern. These events, as well as others across the country, sparked massive protests and opened a dialogue among city officials, minority leaders, and law enforcement agents. Black people are consistently arrested, charged and convicted of drug crimes including possession, distribution and conspiracy at far higher rates than white people. This, despite research showing that both races use and sell drugs at about the same rate. But when it comes to drug arrests, Blacks are arrested at a rate more than twice their percentage in the population. Twenty nine percent of drug arrests, according to FBI statistics, are of African American people. The federal government’s encouragement of unprecedented raids on immigrant communities and workplaces by local law enforcement in cooperation with federal agencies has targeted Latino communities in particular. These policies have unjustly expanded the purview of and undermined basic trust in local law enforcement, alienated immigrant communities, and created an atmosphere of fear. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has led to a dramatic increase in hate crimes against and racial profiling of Latinos.

Sources

1. Racial Identity and Racial Attitudes Among White AmericansMatthew Hunt-Ashley Reichelmann - Identities in Everyday Life - 2019

2. Racial Profiling/Biased PolicingClayton Mosher - Sociology Compass - 2011

3. Frontmatter- Racial Profiling in Canada - 2008

4. Megan Paxton - Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management - 2009

Feedback Reflection

Feedback from Writing Activity 2:

Cite My sources correctly try to avoid Plagiarism.

How Feedback Was Used:

I have did more research and try to use my cite sources correctly.

How Feedback Will Help You with Future Writing:

It will help me improve my writing in the near future and use different sources so i will be able to cite the correct sources and correct formatting style.