Tag: Disproportionate contact

One in 20 US homicides are committed by police – and the numbers aren’t falling | US policing | The Guardian

It is VERY IMPORTANT to keep in mind that this article has a single premise – police are bad. There I save you a lot of reading.

Now if you have an open mind and look at the evidence keep the following in mind as you read the article.

  • Offenders are accountable for their behavior.
  • Police react to offender’s behavior.
  • Police make mistakes and police make bad decisions under life and death conditions.
  • Unarmed people can kill.
  • It is lawful for police to protect themselves and others.
  • Police do not have to be shot at before they can use deadly force.
  • Police have to use more force than the offender to overcome the offender’s force.
  • Police use of force many times is not easy or pretty.
  • Disproportionate by race to it’s population does not equal racism.
  • There are many factors that drive police-citizen contacts.

Police killings of any sort account for nearly 5% of all homicides, with at least 1,192 people killed by law enforcement in 2022
— Read on http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/15/us-homicides-committed-by-police-gun-violence

Driving While Black A Report on Racial Profiling Metro Nashville Police Department Traffic Stops

Our report shows that “driving while black” constitutes a unique series of risks, vulnerabilities, and dangers at the hands of the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) that white drivers do not experience in the same way.

Upon reviewing MNPD’s traffic stop database, our report finds that:

• Between 2011-2015, MNPD conducted 7.7 times more traffic stops annually than the U.S. national average

• Between 2011-2015, MNPD made more stops of black people than there were black people 16 years old and over living in Davidson County

• Between 2011-2015, MNPD consistently and unnecessarily stopped and searched black drivers in predominantly black, Hispanic, and low-income communities at rates substantially higher than they did white drivers in predominantly middle to upper income communities

• MNPD consent searches are invasive and fail to yield incriminating evidence 88.4% of the time.

• Evidence of unlawful activity is found during searches of white drivers more often than in searches of black and Hispanic drivers

• Nearly 80% of all MNPD traffic stops in 2015 result in a warning, and, in traffic stops including a search of the vehicle or driver, between one-third and half result in a warning, which means hundreds of thousands of drivers are being stopped and searched unnecessarily every year

• Since 2012, Operation Safer Streets (OSS) has resulted in more than 58,000 vehicle stops and 11,000 arrests, the vast majority of which were concentrated in communities of color. More than 90% of OSS arrests were for misdemeanors, often for possession of small amounts of marijuana or driving without a license, and more than 80% of stops yielded no evidence that warranted arrest.

See the report HERE:

drivingwhileblacknashville.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/driving-while-black-gideons-army.pdf

Ohio Lawmaker Wants Law Requiring Police to Record Race During Traffic Stops

An Ohio lawmaker says she will introduce legislation requiring police agencies to record race data when making traffic stops, following a Marshall Project – Cleveland investigation into how the village of Bratenahl tickets mostly Black drivers from neighboring Cleveland.

State Rep. Juanita Brent, a Democrat from Cleveland, said the information is needed to determine whether police agencies unfairly stop more Black and Brown drivers compared to White drivers.

This article was published in partnership with News 5 Cleveland.

The Marshall Project – Cleveland’s investigation noted that 60% or more of drivers cited for traffic violations by Bratenahl police since 2020 were Black.

See More HERE

Misdemeanor Prosecution | NBER

Communities across the United States are reconsidering the public safety benefits of prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanor offenses. So far there has been little empirical evidence to inform policy in this area. In this paper we report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants’ subsequent criminal justice involvement. We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should move forward with prosecution in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. These ADAs vary in the average leniency of their prosecution decisions. We find that, for the marginal defendant, nonprosecution of a nonviolent misdemeanor offense leads to large reductions in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint over the next two years. These local average treatment effects are largest for first-time defendants, suggesting that averting initial entry into the criminal justice system has the greatest benefits. We also present evidence that a recent policy change in Suffolk County imposing a presumption of nonprosecution for a set of nonviolent misdemeanor offenses had similar beneficial effects: the likelihood of future criminal justice involvement fell, with no apparent increase in local crime rates.

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w28600

From the VERA Institute

Misdemeanor cases make up over 80 percent of the cases processed by the U.S. criminal justice system, yet we know little about the causal impacts of misdemeanor prosecution. In this talk, we will report the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants’ subsequent criminal justice involvement. To do this, we leverage the quasi-random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to arraigning assistant district attorneys in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts between 2004 and 2018. We find that the marginal prosecuted misdemeanor defendant has a substantially higher risk of being charged with a subsequent criminal complaint, of being prosecuted on that complaint, and of acquiring a criminal record of that complaint, within two years of their initial case. These effects appear to work through a longer time to case disposition, an increased likelihood of acquiring a criminal record of a misdemeanor complaint, and an increased likelihood of a misdemeanor conviction in the current case.

See the VIDEO HERE:

https://www.vera.org/events/neil-a-weiner-research-speaker-series/misdemeanor-prosecution

Drug Arrests Stayed High Even as Imprisonment Fell From 2009 to 2019

To better identify and understand recent changes in and effects of the use of the criminal legal system to address drug problems, The Pew Charitable Trusts analyzed publicly available national data on drug arrests and imprisonment, drug treatment, and harm from drug misuse from 2009 through 2019—the most recent decade for which data is available.
The study found divergent enforcement trends—high rates of arrest but substantially reduced incarceration—coupled with a lack of treatment options and high mortality rates among people with illicit drug dependence.

  • Drug possession arrests held steady at more than a million a year, in stark contrast with a large reduction in overall arrests, which dropped 29%.
  • Only 1 in 13 people who were arrested and had a drug dependency received treatment while in jail or prison.
  • Racial disparities in drug enforcement declined. Arrests of Black people for drug offenses fell by 37%, more than three times the drop among White people.
  • Increased arrests of White individuals for possession of methamphetamine offset declines in marijuana arrests and drove the reduction in racial disparities.
  • The numbers of people admitted to and held in state prisons for drug offenses both fell by about a third, accounting for 61% of the overall reduction in prison populations and 38% of the total decline in admissions.
  • The decline in the number of Black people incarcerated for drug offenses made up 26% of the decrease in prison admissions and 48% of the drop in the prison population.
  • Drug- and alcohol-related mortality rates increased fivefold in prisons and threefold in jails despite the decreases in the number of people in prison for drug offenses.

See more HERE

The report can be downloaded HERE