Law - Criminal Wk 3 Summative Assignment: Community Policing Presentation

1

2

State Demographic Data

Elizabeth Knox

Professor Hullar

University of Phoenix

CJA/336

August 23,2025

Introduction

This discussion examines African Americans and the fact that they are overrepresented in the prison system. African Americans make up a significantly smaller proportion of the general population, yet they are always incarcerated at much higher rates compared to Whites. These differences indicate how structural inequalities persist into the criminal justice system to replicate cycles of disadvantage (Conyers, Lynn, & Leigey, 2023).

Data Interpretation

The state and national statistics have been reporting similar facts that African Americans are about 13 percent of the population and about 40 percent of prisoners. Such inequalities are not attributable to crime variability. Instead, research highlights how racially based profiling and disparate sentencing, as well as discriminatory policing practices, have an outsized effect on African Americans (Gmez & Farr, 2023). The endurance of these disparities can be defined as a carryover of racialized oppressive apparatuses where imprisonment is postulated as the new form of lynching. In addition to this, Tadros and McCaskill (2023) also suggest that the current microaggression of mass incarceration and associated segregation resembles the American slavery paradigm, which maintains its practice of oppression through novel acts of law and institutional domination.

Strategy for Reducing Disparities

Working with local communities through collaborative community policing efforts is one of the strategies that can help to reduce these disparities. Police agencies are supposed to establish relationships with schools, religious groups, and local powerhouses with an aim of carrying out restorative justice programs. Those are solutions which focus on remedying damage, on keeping offenders away in the realm of criminals, and on desisting the use of a punitive approach which are based on retribution. The strategies not only reduce recidivism but also build a sense of trust in the historically marginalized communities through policing (Conyers et al., 2023).

Improvement in Reporting

In order to facilitate accountability, law enforcement agencies are encouraged to consider embracing the uniform use of digital reporting that better breaks out racial and ethnic data. Releasing such information publicly would be keeping citizens in the know, keeping researchers aware of disparities, and making communities more capable of holding institutions to task. Increased reliability in reporting would be a precondition to data-driven reforms that set direct targets at racial disparities in incarceration.

References

Conyers, A., Lynn, V., & Leigey, M. (Eds.). (2023). Mass incarceration in the 21st Century: Realities and reflections.

Gómez, Y., & Farr, P. (2023). “Today's Lynching is Incarceration”: Critical Race Theory, Mass Incarceration, and Prison Abolition. In  Mass Incarceration in the 21st Century (pp. 261-271). Routledge.

Tadros, E., & McCaskill, A. (2023). Mass Incarceration and Microaggressions: America’s Modern Day Slavery.  Journal of Psychological Perspective,  5(1), 1-8.