In police-initiated encounters, Black Americans more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, treated violently, and killed.
While police initiate contact with Black and White Americans at equal rates, Black Americans are over twice as likely to be arrested, over twice as likely to be threatened or experience use of force, and nearly three times more likely to be killed by police. Black Americans are also nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated after a police encounter.
In previous posts, I discussed how Black Americans are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates than White Americans. One potential counterargument is that Black Americans more likely to be arrested and incarcerated because they are more likely to commit crime. In the absence of robust data criminality potential, or self-report of criminal activity, police-initiated contact is a good proxy as suspicion of criminality is a valid estimate of actual criminality. By using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Contacts Between Police and the Public report as a criminality propensity denominator for analysis arrest data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program, incarceration data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Prisoners Statistics program, and police fatal shootings data from the Washington Post Police Shootings database, I find seven key findings that show racial disparities are persistent and systematic across the range of police engagement outcomes.
1. In 2015, the last year of publicly available data, police were equally likely to initiate contact with White and Black Americans.
For White and Black Americans, there was a 1 in 9 (11%) likelihood that they would be approached or stopped by police, though Black Americans are more likely to be pulled over for traffic stops. This suggests that police are not “profiling” potential persons of criminality based on race. In other words, police practices do not suggest they expect Black Americans to be engaging in more criminality than White Americans, perhaps with the exception of traffic violations.
2. Black Americans are over twice as likely (2.1x) to be arrested after a police-initiated interaction than White Americans.
While 29% of White Americans are arrested after police-initiated interactions, 60% of Black Americans are arrested.
3. If Black Americans were arrested at the White rate, over 1.1 million fewer Black Americans would be arrested each year; they could fill all 29 NBA stadiums twice over.
If White Americans were arrested at the Black rate, over 5.7 million more White Americans would be arrested, equivalent to the population of Colorado.
4. As a result of police-initiated contact, Black Americans are nearly six times (5.7x) more likely to be incarcerated than White Americans.
5. Police are over twice as likely (2.2x) to threaten or used force on Black Americans than White Americans.
This includes the threat of use of force and actual use of force that includes grabbing, pushing, hitting, kicking, handcuffing, pepper spray, Taser-ing, or pointing of gun.
6. A Black American is threatened with or experiences use of force by police every 3 minutes.
And 1 in 58 Black households is likely to have at least one person be threatened with or personally experience use of force in America each year.
7. Police are nearly three times more likely (2.6x) to fatally shoot a Black American than White American.
In 2018, 229 Black Americans were killed by the police; in other words, a Black American is killed by police every 38 hours.
While unambiguous in measuring unequal treatment of blacks and whites by police, this data does not answer why such racial disparities exist. Indeed, the lack of more comprehensive data makes it hard to answer why these disparities exist, and as such, what type of solutions and interventions would be more effective to redress them. Thus, common sense police reforms must first, as stated in the Equal Justice Initiative’s Police Reform platform, require better data collection and disclosure of all police engagements with the populations they are called to serve and protect.