Racial Disparities In Arrests Are Prevalent, But Cause Isn't Clear
Ferguson, Mo., continues to watch and wait as a grand jury decides whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Brown's death was the spark for mass protests in Ferguson, but many of the city's black population say the problems go deeper, and that blacks are unfairly singled out by police.
Ferguson police statistics show the department does arrest blacks at a higher rate than other racial groups. But that disparity is true for police departments across the country.
Brad Heath, an investigative reporter with USA Today, wrote in a story last week that the most remarkable thing about Ferguson might be just how ordinary it is. He examined data that police departments report to the FBI each year and compared the number of black people arrested during 2011 and 2012 with the number who lived in the area the department protects. He notes that the FBI does not track arrests of Hispanics as a separate race.
Heath tells guest host Tess Vigeland that nationally, black people are arrested at a rate about three times higher than other races, and Ferguson aligns pretty closely with that average.
"But if you look at the geography of those inequities, there are a lot of cities where the disparity is five times higher, 10 times higher, even 20 times higher," Heath says.
One of those cities Heath talks about is Dearborn, Mich., where blacks are only 4 percent of the population, yet made up more than half of arrests in 2011 and 2012. Here's the catch: A lot of those arrested don't actually live in Dearborn.
"They do get a lot of people driving through from Detroit on their way to work [and] they do have a large shopping mall and a large retail presence," he says. "So you see a lot of people who wouldn't be counted in the resident population."
Heath says this sort of situation can and does skew the disparity numbers in many of the cities he looked at with smaller populations of black residents.
Despite that, Heath says Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad does acknowledge the accumulated mistrust that comes when the population standing in line at the courthouse doesn't look like the city as a whole.
"It's become a really interesting challenge for them to try to solve," he says.
The difficult question to answer, Heath says, is why these disparities in arrests are so prevalent across the agencies reporting data to the FBI. He says while it certainly points out the possibility of law enforcement bias, it could point to other factors as well.
"This could be a function of disparities in economic outcomes, in education, in poverty, in all sorts of other social variables that are really hard to measure and really hard to correlate," Heath says.
What is clear, he says, is that the police chiefs he has talked to are concerned and want to figure out why the disparities exist — "so that we can do something about it so that the communities we're trying to police will trust us," he says.
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Transcript
TESS VIGELAND, HOST:
Ferguson, Missouri, continues to watch and wait as a grand jury decides whether to indict police Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Brown's death was the spark for protests in Ferguson. But many African-Americans from the city say, the problems go deeper, and that they are unfairly singled out by police. And FBI statistics show the department in Ferguson does arrest African-Americans at a higher rate than other racial groups, but that disparity is true for police departments across the country. Brad Heath is an investigative reporter with USA Today. And in a story this week, he wrote that the most remarkable thing about Ferguson's arrest record might be just how ordinary it is.
BRAD HEATH: Nationally, it turns out that black people are arrested at a rate about three times higher than people of any other race, and that's pretty much what you find in Ferguson. But if you look at the geography of those inequities, there are a lot of cities where the disparity is, you know, five times higher, 10 times higher, even 20 times higher.
VIGELAND: Well, in fact, one of the examples that you point to is Dearborn, Michigan. Four percent of that city's population is black, yet more than fifty percent of the people arrested were black.
HEATH: That's right. I mean, Dearborn's an interesting city. It's a mostly white city, although the white population includes a huge Arab immigrant population. And it's sort of tucked into the southwest corner of Detroit, which is the poorest and blackest of America's major cities. I went and spent the morning at district court couple weeks ago. And almost everybody waiting in line to come into the court to answer for these petty criminal offenses was black. And they all - you know, it dawned on a lot of them that they don't look like the city in which they were arrested.
VIGELAND: Well, in fact, you did ask the police chief to respond to what you found. What did he tell you?
HEATH: He said a couple things that were interesting. One was - which I think is true - a lot of the people his officers arrest don't live in the city of Dearborn. So it's hard to judge them just by the demographics of that particular city because they do get a lot of people driving through from Detroit on their way to work. They do have a large shopping mall and a large retail presence. So you see a lot of people who wouldn't be counted in the resident population.
And the other thing that he pointed out was a lot of the arrests his officers make are initiated by somebody else. It'll be a mall security guard or somebody who detained somebody for shoplifting or suspects them of something else. And his officers show up and just arrest whoever security has picked out already. But he does acknowledge the sort of accumulated mistrust that comes from having everybody standing in line at the courthouse not look like the city. And it's become a really interesting challenge for them to try to solve.
VIGELAND: Well, of course, Brad, the biggest question all this raises is why. Why are police arresting African-Americans at such higher rates than any other group?
HEATH: That turns out to be a really hard question to answer. And we talked to a lot of experts in profiling and policing and a lot of police chiefs and officers. And they say, there's, you know - it certainly points out the possibility of law enforcement bias. But it also points out that this could be a function of disparities in economic outcomes, in education, in poverty, in all sorts of other social variables that are really hard to measure and really hard to correlate.
So what you're left with is - you know, you don't know exactly what's causing these numbers to be so different. But what you do know is to go back to that experience in a Dearborn courtroom - that when people look around the benches to see who's waiting to be arraigned, they realize that there is this disparity. And most of the police chiefs I talked to were pretty concerned about the fact that it exists. And, you know, what - can we figure out why it exists, so that we can do something about it, so that the communities we're trying to police will trust us?
VIGELAND: Brad Heath is an investigative reporter with USA Today. Brad, thank you.
HEATH: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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