Proof of Systemic Racism in America

Evidence pointing towards systemic racism in America.

The idea that systemic racism exists is so heavily disputed that I think it is useful to compile a list of various studies that collectively help prove systemic racism.

Before examining the stories and the data we could also try to understand what is driving this systemic racism. A lot of this is down to attitudes towards blacks (1990 study)

For example, 56 percent of white persons believe that black persons prefer to live off welfare, 51 percent believe that black persons are prone to violence, 29 percent view black persons as unintelligent, and 44 percent view them as lazy

White Lawyer Getting Himself Arrested

Here is an interesting story from the Atlantic: I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.

Now this is not data or statistics per say, but it is a useful starting point to see how systemic racism works in practice. To help understand what is behind the statistics you see. Let me pick some salient points:

But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed — shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings

Ask yourself. How do you measure this kind of systemic discrimination? It is not easy, because you need some kind of recording of every infraction done by both blacks and whites which leads to and doesn’t lead to police investigation and prosecution. But if there is a difference in how willing people are to report blacks and white teens and how willing police are to take this serious, then this cannot get reflected in police statistics.

However as we will see with some later examples, there are cases where researchers have found ways to get past this problem. But lets continue with our lawyer story. This lawyer deliberately started doing graffiti to get himself arrested for the same things he saw black clients get arrested for.

I walked up to the east entrance of City Hall and tagged the words “N.Y.P.D. Get Your Hands Off Me” on a gatepost in red paint. The surveillance video shows me doing this, 20 feet from the police officer manning the gate. I moved closer, within 10 feet of him, and tagged it again. I could see him inside watching video monitors that corresponded to the different cameras.

You would think he would get arrested being caught red handed. But no:

…As I waited for him to jump out, grab me, or Tase me, he sped away and hung a left, leaving me standing there alone. I’ve watched the video a dozen times and it’s still hard to believe.

At another point while he was spraying a wall a black man came to warn him, that the police would arrest him. Yet when the police arrived, they did not arrest the white lawyer holding the spraycan and stencil. Instead they ran after the black guy who had done nothing.

I stood quietly, wondering whether they would arrest me or write a summons. The officers grumbled a few choice curse words and then ran down the stairs in pursuit of the young man. Though I was the one clearly breaking a law, they went after him.

When he finally did get arrested, he noticed how different he was treated from the black people who got arrested:

Over the next 24 hours, I watched as men and women came and went, many with cuts, bruises, and welts. I asked several of them how they’d been injured, and they described fierce struggles with the police. One young man cradled what he reported was a broken wrist. Another pulled up his shirt and revealed three Taser burns. Yet another removed his fitted cap and pointed to a swollen knot on his head.

So how can we prove this kind of stuff happens without being dismissed as: This is just anecdotical evidence? Fortunately one can perform controlled experiments and sometimes there are natural experiments happening which exposes the problems:

Drug Charges Against Non-Whites Study

The Economist reported on a study done at the University of Maryland by Cody Tuttle: Smoking-gun evidence emerges for racial bias in American courts.

This is part of what Economists calls natural experiments, where some law changes in ways which allows us to study a social phenomena which is otherwise hard to study.

I compare cases sentenced before and after the Fair Sentencing Act, a 2010 law that changed the 10-year mandatory minimum threshold for crack-cocaine from 50g to 280g.

The graphic below illustrates the problem. You can see after the change in legislation you see a dramatic surge in black and hispanics getting arrested for having 280–290g of crack-cocaine. For whites the change is far more modest.

Code Tuttle concludes the following:

I find the following: (1) after 2010, there is a sharp increase in the fraction of cases at 280g, the amount that now triggers the 10-year mandatory minimum; (2) this increase is disproportionately large for black and Hispanic offenders; (3) this increase is driven by prosecutors; (4) the fraction of cases at 280g falls once evidentiary standards become stricter; and (5) the racial disparity in the increase cannot be explained by differences in education, sex, age, criminal history, seized drug amount, or other elements of the crime, but it can be almost entirely explained by a measure of state-level racial animus.

Blacks more likely to be shot than whites even when holding harmless objects

When police are more likely to shoot unarmed black men then whites, how do you determine this in an objective fashion? Police are the ones making the recordings of the scene and what happened, which can influence the statistics.

A way around this is to create a controlled experiment which is what was done at the University of Washington: Blacks more likely to be shot than whites even when holding harmless objects.

the research used a virtual reality simulation and was prompted by a number of mistaken shootings of unarmed blacks by police officers in recent years. It was directed by Anthony Greenwald, a University of Washington psychologist who examines the unconscious roots and levels of prejudice.

While the study did not involve police officers it was trying to find implicit bias in the population at large. It is not unreasonable to assume that Police officers hold similar biases to the population at large. In fact it would be odd if Police had a more favorable view of minorities given the nature of their work.

Data from the two experiments indicated that the subjects had greater difficulty distinguishing weapons from harmless objects in the hands of blacks than whites. They also were more likely to shoot when the target person was black, regardless of knowing what was in the person’s hand. In the two experiments, whites were wrongly “shot” 26 percent of the time while blacks were wrongly “shot” 35 percent of the time, which is statistically significant.

Racial Profiling of Drivers

Here we have another natural experiment: Black drivers are less likely to be stopped by police after sunset.

After dark police officers cannot tell whether drivers are white or black. This significantly changes outcomes for black drivers.

The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.

This was based on a massive study comparing traffic stops in many different states over the year. And it was not the time of the day which determined with blacks got stopped less often but how soon it got dark in that state for that part of the year. Thus if cops could clearly see that the driver was black, he or she would be more likely to get stopped.

Hit Rates When Searching Black Drivers

Studies have been conducted of whether black drivers are searching based on a lower threshold than whites. What do we mean by that? When police stops a car, they may look at different factors that make the driver look suspicious.

How can we determined if black people get discriminated against? Looking at number of stops alone doesn’t tell the full story as there might simply be more black drivers with contraband.

The way researchers solve this is by grouping drivers into different groups and look at the hit rate for contraband (illegal items such as unregistered guns or drugs). Thus we can compare both black and white drivers who have objective and clear reasons to be searched with those which are searched without any good reason. A simple way of looking at this might be that there are some people who stick out more as obvious criminals. While others are more typical law abiding citizens.

Nature has an article doing just this kind of study: A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States.

…the threshold test indicates that the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers is generally lower than that for searching white drivers across the municipal police departments and states we consider. In aggregate across cities, the inferred threshold for white drivers is 10.0% compared to 5.0 and 4.6% for black and Hispanic drivers, respectively.

Stop and Frisk in Black and White Neighborhoods

Even stronger discrepancies between blacks and white are seen in neighborhood stop and frisk practices. Villanova University conducted a study of stop and frisk by professor Lance Hannon, resported by the Philadelphia Inquirer:

I also looked at how the crime rate of an area differently matters in predicting the likelihood of a frisk based on the racial composition of the area. I found that the association between violent crime and the likelihood that an officer will frisk someone is contingent on the degree to which African Americans are present in the neighborhood. So in predominantly black neighborhoods, the association between the violent crime rate and the frisk rate is very weak. In areas that are not predominantly African American, the association is moderately strong and in the direction you would expect: higher violent crime rates mean higher frisk rates.

Bias is showed by the fact that black people are stopped more frequently that their predisposition towards carrying contraband:

My study provided support for two findings in previous research. First, African Americans are more likely to experience a frisk when stopped. Second, African Americans are more likely to experience unproductive frisks — in which the frisk does not uncover any contraband or lead to an arrest.

Systemic Dehumanization of Black Children

American Psychology association has a study about: Black Boys Viewed as Older, Less Innocent Than Whites, Research Finds

Researchers reviewed police officers’ personnel records to determine use of force while on duty and found that those who dehumanized blacks were more likely to have used force against a black child in custody than officers who did not dehumanize blacks. The study described use of force as takedown or wrist lock; kicking or punching; striking with a blunt object; using a police dog, restraints or hobbling; or using tear gas, electric shock or killing. Only dehumanization and not police officers’ prejudice against blacks — conscious or not — was linked to violent encounters with black children in custody, according to the study.

They go onto do various measures of attitudes towards black children in general, in the rest of the population:

The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes

The point here is being able to connect attitudes and behavior. Racism and prejudice isn’t merely about words. In this cases we see how prejudice leads to abuse and violence against suspects. Often against the most vulnerable citizens such as children.

Crack Cocaine Sentencing

79% of Crack Cocaine offenders are black while only 28% of Powder Cocaine offenders are are Black. Until Obama changed sentencing rules with the Fair Sentencing Act, you would get 100x stricter punishment for crack compared to powder cocaine despite the fact that studies show the effects are more or less the same. Hence a person caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine would get the same sentence as some caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Hence the drug preferred by blacks because of being significantly cheaper, carried a much higher penality.

Combined with a 115-month average imprisonment for crack offenses, compared with an average of 87 months for cocaine offenses, the sentencing disparity results in more African-Americans spending more time in the prison system.

Hence the War on Drugs no doubt hit African-Americans harder, and put them away in prison for much longer time.

Jury Selection

Why are African-Americans so heavily overrepresented on incarceration in the US. Rules on drug sentencing such as Crack Cocaine as well as more African-American living in poverty certainly plays a role. However the Jury selection process also plays a significant role.

Berkley Law has published a study of Jury discrimination in Calefornia. Blacks tends to get removed from juries.

Prosecutors used their strikes to remove African-American jurors in nearly 75 percent of these cases, Latinx jurors in about 28 percent, and white jurors in only three cases (0.4 percent).

This has negative consequences for Blacks as the white middle class who tends to hold jury positions like to hand out harsher punishment:

“These studies consistently show that whites are more punitive than African Americans, believing that the criminal legal system operates in a race-neutral and generally fair manner,” she says.

And the rules for kicking out Jury members seems specifically designed to allow targeting of Blacks while pretending to be “race-neutral”:

Reasons for jury strikes included having dreadlocks, wearing a short skirt or large earrings, distrust of law enforcement, having family members who are incarcerated, and expressing a belief that the criminal legal system treats people differently based on their race.

Thus if you have hairstyles which is natural for black people you get kicked out. Due to the exceptionally high incarceration rate of African Americans, you also get a high likelihood of having family members who are incarcerated. Something which will exclude you from Jury duty.

Or what about the deep iron of the last part:

expressing a belief that the criminal legal system treats people differently based on their race.

Hence discrimination against blacks, is rationalized on the grounds that black people see themselves as discriminated. It is hard to make in unjust system more fair if believing the system to be unfair is not allowed.

Health Care for Black People

There is a large number of studies showing how black people in the US get worse health care treatment in almost every regard. Part of this is done to stubborn stereotypes about black people not rooted in any scientific fact. E.g. UVA reports: Black Americans are Systematically Under-Treated for Pain. Why?

Racial disparities are particularly striking in pain treatment, Trawalter said, with studies showing that Black patients are significantly less likely to be prescribed pain medication and that they generally receive lower doses of it when they are. One possible reason for this, supported by existing studies, is that white people believe Black people experience less pain. Trawalter is attempting to uncover the root causes of this belief.

White Convicts As Likely to Be Hired As Blacks Without Criminal Records

A Princeton and Harvard study titled Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment, by Devah Pager and Bruce Western found that former white convicts had the same chance of getting hired as a black person without a criminal record. From DMI Blog post about study:

However, the study revealed that our society’s racism extends even deeper: black applicants with no criminal record were no more likely to get a job than white applicants with criminal records just released from prison! In other words, while whites with criminal records received low rates of positive responses, such response rates were equally low for blacks without a criminal background. Further exposing the overt racism at play was the study’s finding that minority employers were more accepting of minority applicants and job applicants with prison records.

Far more African Americans Are Arrested for Drug Crimes

Human Rights Watch details problems with how African Americans are arrested at a stunningly high level despite not corresponding higher level of drug usage.

The marked racial disparities in drug arrests did not reflect racial differences in violations of drug laws prohibiting possession and sale of illicit drugs. Statistical as well as anecdotal evidence indicate drug possession and drug selling cut across all racial, socio-economic and geographic lines. Yet because drug law enforcement resources have been concentrated in low-income, predominantly minority urban areas, drug offending whites have been disproportionately free from arrest compared to blacks.

I remember reading an article years ago about this where a police officer was asking why they never went into white neighborhoods to arrest people for drug usage. The depressing response he got was that in those neighborhoods they had too many connections. Resourceful white people who knew lawyers, judges, politicians and other influential individuals which could cause serious problems for the police if they went in there and arrested people. Black people in contrast was easy to arrest. Nobody blinks and eye, because they have no connections and they are already pre-judged.

To Be Continued…

This is work in progress, and I will keep adding studies here as I come across them. And by all means suggest studies I should add. I simply see the claims that there is no proof of systemic racism so often, that it is useful to have a collection of studies disproving this myth.