Studies

Research on racial bias in policing

“The police… save white communities from the evils of inner-city crime… They are the heroes who keep Compton in Compton and Chicago in Chicago… This is not something that all white Americans explicitly think or say, but it is the overwhelming narrative of our culture."

“While the trends in the total-number of capital-eligible homicides show slight differences for Black and White victim events, the clearance rates are dramatically different. … White victim homicides are more likely to be cleared by arrest."

“People who attribute the cause of racial disparities to blacks committing more violations … engage in motivated reasoning.” & “Only a predictable subset of the population is responsive to information about racial disparities in the criminal justice system."

“Operation Impact…quickly increased the number of police officers in specific high-crime areas designated as ‘impact zones’” Found significant negative impact of these policies on standardized test scores of black youth in affected areas.

“Civil asset forfeiture was originally proposed to halt large criminal enterprises… but… disproportionately affected poor communities and communities of color and focuses too often on … low-level offenses—such as a $60 marijuana sale or a minor traffic infraction."

“Racist blue humor plays a role in rendering non-white officers more ‘blue’ than Black, Latino/a, Asian American, and so on…non-white police endure, and appear to adapt to…dominant police cultural norms… as officers of color either assimilate, or are rendered targets."

“More than half of the black-white sentence disparity that is unexplained by the arrest offense and offenders' prior traits can be explained by…prosecutors' decision to file charges that carry ‘mandatory minimum’ sentences…65 percent more often against black defendants."

“Policing of blacks has been disproportionately aggressive for crimes associated with high levels of police discretion… Racial profiling [is] not limited to…unwarranted searches, but extend[s] to a higher propensity to arrest blacks given a marginal amount of evidence."

“African Americans and Latinos who had been stopped and disrespected by the police were less willing to assist them and less likely to believe that the police care … Contact with the police, by itself, had no negative effects on attitudes… police treatment [did]."