For the Symposium: Deconstructing Ferguson One Year Later
“You need to be
twice as good and work twice as hard.”
This is a crucial piece of received wisdom in the black community -- lessons
taught through the rituals of adolescence, teachers’ expectations and decisions,
job turndowns, and the glances of strangers.
In other words, black life and not books impart this wisdom. Black kids learn another lesson, too. That
they should behave twice as well “and if they don’t learn it fast enough,” a young justice-involved man once told
me, “they end up in the
system, and there go another male.” The
messages make plain that each of their missteps will have grave consequences
and that their innocence, because of their race, is forever in doubt.
In the year of
national reckoning that began with Michael Brown’s death, and by the week travelled
through New York, Baltimore, Charleston, Cleveland, and Atlanta, our
consciousness was raised. These videos are
to 21st Century America what the dogs and water hoses were to our
parents and grandparents. The
heinousness of the actions of white authorities contrasted with the
powerlessness of those being pummeled by water, fear-choked into silence, and
tasered into docility, is fast becoming the central paradox our democracy
attends to in times when we need a moral facelift.
But there is
one idea that has for too long gone unchallenged, one that enjoys the
imprimatur of statistical evidence and the silent worship of Americans of all traditions
and beliefs – in other words, something like an ideology. Our collective gaze
is trained on the gruesomeness of these police killings, the “I can’t breathes,”
the ‘nickel rides’ and severed vertebrae, the cold indifference of
law-enforcers and medics as they stood over the broken, choked, bullet-ridden
bodies unmoved to action. Our
captivation tends to end there.
Our nation
objects to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Shawn
Dubose, and the others being killed and maimed, but we do not find repellent
their status as “suspect citizens,” the presumptive criminality that engulfs
their race. “Why did he run?” we ask.
“Why had he failed to appear in court?”
“Why didn’t she just comply with the officers instructions?” Less an
object of our disgust is how easy it is to have unwanted contact with police in
neighborhoods like Michael Brown’s. The ideology of black lawlessness – the one
Khalil Muhammad shows governed
progressive circles for much of the 20th century – still enjoys a comfortable place in
our national mindset and continues to define black citizenship. This stigma
that attends a sizable group of our fellow citizens is as formidable as it is
invisible: it drives decisions about
where to live and who to hire in some communities while shaping the daily existence
of members of other communities, who discern what kinds of mundane behaviors
are off limits. This distortion of
democracy, state legitimacy, and justice, is still very much with us as we
blindly rush to outfit police with cameras and better training.
A few years
before Michael Brown was killed, a majority (66%) of white Americans believed
that the word “violent” described “most” blacks well (Associated Press/GFK 2012
survey). This
belief endures although they no longer see police mistreatment of blacks as
epiphenomal. Nevertheless, the idea that police brutality is aberational rests
on a much more poisonous dynamic: the diminished recognition of white
criminality while blacks are construed as a criminal race. You might recognize
its close cousin, the “missing white women” syndrome, the much greater
outpouring of sympathy and resources when white girls go missing than when
black girls disappear.
To understand
fully the disappearance of white criminality from public discourse, I must turn
to a thought exercise and some empirics even though I heed Khalil Muhammad’s
caution that statistics can win a few victories on the battlefield of ideas but
not the war.
We might take
as a measure of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system whether it targets
the right people. People who report
doing illegal things should get arrested and people who don’t, should not. One could imagine a two-by-two table with
four quadrants, like so:
Conduct
(did something illegal)
YES NO
YES X
Contact
(was arrested/jailed)
NO X
For a
legitimate system, we want most people to fall in the marked diagonal and we
would want as few as possible in the opposite diagonal. In other words, we want contact to closely
and tightly follow conduct. There
will be mistakes in interpreting offending and law-abiding, for sure, but the
exceptions should not mock the rule.
Let us now
measure how things stand in America today.
I turn to a large, overtime data source, the National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth
(NLSY). The NLSY asks a nationally representative survey sample of about 12,000
young adults questions about their criminal offending and direct experiences
with the criminal justice system over time in two very different cohorts, one
that turned 18 around 1980 and one that came of age about two decades later. The
NLSY does so in a non-intrusive manner, and many scholars treat these measures
as good proxies for actual criminal offending. There are a few slight differences in
question-wording between the two different years of the survey, so we should
interpret the overtime comparisons with caution.
An analysis of
the 2000 NLSY cohort shows quite clearly that its members were much more likely
to have contact with legal authorities than the 1980 cohort, even though the
earlier cohort engaged in more criminal offenses. Notably members of the 2000 cohort reached adulthood under the policy and
practices of broken windows policing, zero tolerance, the drug war, and
mandatory minimums. Concretely, in the
1980 cohort of 18-23 year-olds, only 11 percent had been arrested by police, while
a quarter of the 2000 cohort of the
same age had. Unfortunately, only the 1980 data include measures of being
stopped by police (without arrest), so we cannot track changes over time in
stop-and-frisks. But it is clear that the
later cohort experienced more encounters with police.
The question
then is whether the later cohort engaged in more criminal behaviors than the
1980 cohort, which would support their higher levels of contact with
authorities. Again, analysis of the data
suggests this is not the case. Not only
did the later cohort come of age during an era of sharp declines in serious
victimization, in the earlier decade, self-reported criminal behavior explained
6% of the variance in arrest; by 2000, it explained just 3% of the variance. Criminal
conduct is a less good predictor in the later cohort than the earlier one of
having contact. In 1980, if you did not engage in unlawful behaviors, you were
quite unlikely to experience arrest (21%).
By 2000, it was the exact inverse; as a result of net-widening policies,
just over three-quarters of the people
who had experienced arrest did not report engaging in a property or violent
crime.
More crucially
for the argument here, though, is that in 1980, this basic pattern doesn’t
differ significantly by racial group. In
2002, it does. Dramatically. Crime begins to explain less of the variance
between the races in contact with criminal justice authorities. By 2002, the
share of people in the off-diagonal grows and
differs by group. Crime distributions by
race don’t change much across the two cohorts but contact with the law
does. If you are a black young man, your
likelihood of arrest is .41; if you are a young adult white man, it is .30. In 2002, black men were more likely to be
arrested and report no illegal activity than white men (36% compared to 26%). And the group we don’t often discuss when we
speak of crime, namely, those who engage in property damage, theft, or violence
but do not experience arrest or
conviction, is also racially inflected; white men were more likely to engage in
criminal offenses without experiencing arrest (48% of white men compared to 37%
of black men).
Notably, the
pattern cannot be explained by drugs – that inner-city drug markets are policed
more aggressively than drug deals on college campuses or in suburban backyards
– because the patterns hold when we examine only those who reported doing a
property or violent crime, not a drug offense.
The story of
criminal justice over the last three decades, then, is a story of a system that
is over-functioning and under-functioning:
more people are engaging in criminal acts with little risk of arrest and
more are having involuntary contact with authorities who are not engaged in
crime. That is, more people are falling
into the off-diagonals of the conduct/contact two-by-two table. How can both things be true?
Put simply: Blacks
fall in one quadrant, whites for the most part fall in the other and this tendency
became pronounced over time. This does
not a legitimate system make. As
criminal offending became less of a predictor of arrest, at least according to
these nationally representative longitudinal surveys, something else filled the
void: race interacting with class
status. In such a world, are black
parents irrational when we tell our kids the “police are looking for any reason to
give black men a hard time”?
Scholars are
not immune to the black-as-criminal ideology that is so at odds with basic
statistics. I recently told another criminal justice expert, whose reforms are
in vogue at the moment, of my findings.
He acknowledged the statistical story saying that yes, middle class and
affluent white communities did indeed have a crime problem, but countered: “We don’t need more aggressive policing in
their neighborhoods because we can count on their parents for effective social
control.” Black parents, he assumed,
couldn’t be trusted to deal with their kids.
And this is not
simply a matter of distorted media framings that romanticize white criminals as “Bonnie
and Clyde’s” or
decisions not to describe white outlaws in a massive gunfight in Texas as thugs,
as happened recently.
Indeed, the study of black crime is booming, enjoying a robust scholarly
renaissance. A search of “white
criminality” in academic publications yields 143 results; black criminality?
Almost 2,000. That illogical phrase Black-on-black crime comes up in 1600
articles compared to 100 articles on white-on-white crime.
I often ask my (mostly
affluent) students to raise their hands if they have ever done something that
ran afoul of the law – shoplifting, drug use, fighting, trespassing, driving a
car without a license – and they giggle and raise their hands. When I ask them if they should have gone to
jail or be arrested or done court-ordered community service they look at me indignantly. The thought that their conduct could spell adversarial
police contact runs so counter to their worldview of who is criminal and who is
law-abiding that they cannot even fathom it.
They cannot imagine being in the quadrant that many blacks occupy. Asked to explain the distinct punishment of
others who do the same things, some double down on their punitive commitment
with stereotypes-posing-as-reasons much like the criminal justice expert above.
Whiteness and affluence, after all, are nothing if not freedom from police harassment.
The people I
talk to in my research have a different mental mapping. They cannot fathom being in the offending/no
contact quadrant. After asking me about
my lived experience with police and learning that I had never been stopped, one
of my interviewees said “your police ain’t like that? Come through our hood and you’ll get
stopped.” And then he riddled, “Doesn’t
matter if you short, black, or ugly, you gonna get stopped. Just to see who you are.”
The costs of
the ideology for black women and men are clear as ever, the pouring of
inhumanity and guilt on a race. The fact
that whites benefit from it in terms of less supervision is just as real. But we should be careful not to assume that
the black crime ideology is simply a psychological wage for whites or a
symbolic scarlet letter for blacks; it may also have deep consequences for
public safety as well. As the legal
scholar Bennett Capers suggests in a 2010 article:
“for whites, who face less scrutiny and are in fact under-policed, the
cost of crime is reduced, thus making crime itself more profitable.” In less
polite terms, underenforcement breeds white
criminality.
I have provided
some empirical evidence to dispel the cruel hoax. But the effects of this racial religion are
scarcely quantifiable. How many people
avoided black neighborhoods due to this ideology? How many eyewitnesses to crimes thought they
saw one race? How many campaigns of
police surveillance were waged on black neighborhoods? How many people were victimized because
whites had the implicit guarantee of police non-interference?
More importantly,
what kind of society do we envision if we continue along this path?
Vesla M. Weaver is Assistant Professor Political Science and African American Studies. You can reach her by e-mail at vesla.weaver at yale.edu