AFRICANGLOBE – Neill Franklin is a Black man. But he’ll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young Black men.
Franklin, now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs, explained, “When I’d see a young Black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way, … my first thoughts were, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s selling drugs.'”
As the media has increased its scrutiny of police killings of Black men, some of the cases have involved Black police officers. In the case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, for example, three of the six police officers charged for Gray’s death are Black. This has led to some questions about whether racial bias is really at play — can a Black cop be racist against his own racial group?
But social psychologists and criminal justice experts say this question fundamentally misunderstands how institutional racism affects everyone, regardless of race. Racial bias isn’t necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life. And systemic racism,which has been part of the US since its founding, can corrupt anyone’s view of minorities in America.
In the case of police, all cops are dealing with enormous cultural and systemic forces that build racial bias against minority groups. Even if a Black cop doesn’t view himself as racist, the way policing is done in the US is racially skewed — by, for example, targeting predominantly Black neighborhoods. And these policing tactics can actually create and accentuate personal, subconscious bias by increasing the likelihood that officers will relate blackness with criminality or danger — leading to what psychologists call “implicit bias” against Black Americans. Combined, this means the system as a whole and individual officers, even Black ones, by and large act in ways that are deeply racially skewed.
“The culture of policing is one that’s so strong that it can overwhelm individual racial differences,” L. Song Richardson, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said. “People are cops first, and they’re their race second.”
A lot of US police work is inherently racially biased. Cops are told to patrol predominantly poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods that are so segregated that most of the residents are Black. And since police are mostly present in these neighborhoods, most of the arrests and actions they take end up impacting a disproportionate numbers of Black people.
“When departments concentrate enforcement efforts, for example, in high-crime areas, those areas are likely to be areas with disproportionate numbers of minority residents,” David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford Law School, said. “That means minority residents of the community are getting policed more intensely than people that live in other neighborhoods that have smaller proportion of minority residents and lower crime rates.”
The problem is police aren’t just deployed in predominantly Black neighborhoods; they’re also encouraged to arrest and ticket as many people as possible while on the job. Until 2014, a federal grant program financially incentivized local police departments to make as many arrests as possible for drug crimes. Many police departments also use number of arrests as a measure for evaluating individual police officers for raises and promotions. Coupled with deployment in certain areas, these incentives effectively encourage cops to arrest minority residents in large numbers.
“Our criminal justice system and different aspects of our criminal justice system are racist in application,” Franklin, the retired police major, said. “Even if there was no intent in the design for racism, we’ve gotten to a place where it’s the result of our policies.”
Take, for instance, policing in Chicago. This map from Project Know, a drug addiction resource center, shows drug arrests were concentrated in the Windy City’s low-income neighborhoods, which are mostly Black, between January and October 2014:
The disproportionate enforcement in Black neighborhoods helps explain broader disparities across the US justice system. For example, Black Americans are much more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, even though they’re not significantly more likely to use or sell drugs.
Franklin, echoing findings from a Sentencing Project report from earlier this year, said the reason for higher drug arrests among Black people is linked to how people in poorer, urban areas use and sell drugs, which makes it easier for police officers to catch them in the act. “Drug selling and use among whites tends to be more indoors, among friends, word of mouth, and there’s generally no violence associated,” Franklin said. “But, overall, the drug selling and dealing in Black communities tends to be in outdoor areas, because of the urban design and the [economic] competition that’s involved in a community with blight, poverty, and a lack of jobs.”
Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program, said this type of racially disparate enforcement is what caused so many problems in Ferguson, Missouri, where a scathing Justice Department investigation uncovered a pattern of racial bias in the local police force following the police shooting of Michael Brown.
In Ferguson, cops were pressured by the city government to raise as much revenue as possible by ticketing residents. Since they were most active in neighborhoods that are predominantly Black, these residents were targeted at hugely disproportionate rates: Ferguson is about 67 percent African-American, but, from 2012 to 2014, 85 percent of people stopped, 90 percent of people who received a citation, and 93 percent of people arrested were Black.
“It’s not necessarily what’s happening with one police officer,” Parker said. “There are structural reasons for this happening.”
What’s worse, Sklansky said this type of disproportionate enforcement can create “a vicious cycle” in which Black residents are fearful of police, making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive Black residents as suspicious. “Part of the way police patrol is to look for people who look like they’re acting suspicious,” Sklansky said. “So even a police officer who tries not to be racist can wind up giving more of his attention and have more of his suspicion directed at members of minority groups than to white citizens.”
Individual cops are conditioned to discriminate against black people
Of course, racism can and often does show up at the individual level. Some of this may be explicit — like in North Miami Beach, Florida, where police officers used mugshots of Black people as target practice. But very often, this type of racism culminates at the implicit level, where people’s subconscious bias guide their choices even when they’re not fully aware of it.
Over time, police officers are effectively conditioned toward implicit bias. When cops are thrown into situations every day in which Black people are viewed as criminal suspects, they begin to identify people’s race as an indicator for crime and danger.
“Just by virtue of watching the news every night, you learn the unconscious bias because you will always see young Black men being connected to criminality,” Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law said. “Police officers are engaging in proactive policing in urban neighborhoods that may be majority non-white. And as a result, they’re constantly practicing the association of non-white with crime.”
But it can get even more complicated, Richardson said, because stops of innocent people can still reinforce implicit bias. “If [a cop] were to frisk someone and find no evidence of criminal activity, what he’s likely to say to himself is, ‘Oh, well, this guy’s guilty, he just got away with it this time,’ thereby strengthening the association and affecting his memory of the event later,” she said. “In that messed-up way, he actually strengthens his unconscious bias.
