Crime stats and race

[Pastor Gary]

Incarceration rates for black men are 5.5 times higher than white men. Are they that much worse in their character than we are? That's an astounding statement that I challenge anyone to make. But, you don't have to --- we've already made the case. We've got laws, you see. "We're a nation of laws and not of men." Then, there's something badly wrong with the laws, and they didn't make themselves.

Let's ponder that for a while. It is difficult to dispassionately have a discussion about these matters without someone screaming "RACIST!" but let's give it a shot.

I'll accept as accurate your stats: black men have a 5.5X incarceration rate.

To what do you attribute this? Injustice? Do black men -- for whatever reason -- perpetrate more crime than their non-black peers, or do you think they are merely apprehended and convicted at higher rates?

[dolfan]

You've heard of the SETI program. The one where all these microwave antennas are pointed to space in hopes of finding some sign of intelligent life. And, you know they haven't found anything. Is it because it isn't there? Or, is it because there simply isn't enough power on Earth to detect something so faint as we are so far away? If there were 1 million such "eyes" peering across the galaxies, would it make any difference? We don't know because, scientifically, we don't know what's out there. If we had any clue, any hint of a real possibility, we'd devote resources to it and ferret it out.

As I sit here, I'm watching a program on TV about meth addiction and law enforcement efforts. Meth is a white person's drug, for the most part. It is manufactured by whites, taken by whites, sold by whites, more so than by blacks. Alabama has just launched a government sponsored PR campaign called "Zero Meth" with billboards of ugly white people on meth with the caption "I used to be pretty." And, they are being arrested and jailed. The US Department of Justice names meth as the #1 drug threat in Alabama, with most of it now being imported thanks to pseudophedrine sales controls and more sophisticated Mexican production. Labs are fewer, but use is greater. Officials say it costs thousands of dollars to clean up a meth lab, and that it is difficult to get to them because they are indoors. It is a phenomenon sweeping the nation by storm, and it is a tidal wave of destruction.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported an operation in Los Angeles where law enforcement agencies coordinated a highly complex sting utilizing stake-outs, phone taps, electronic surveillance and deep cover guys to infiltrate a white supremacist group which spearheaded a very extensive meth market. The places where they conducted these ops? Very nice homes with well-tended grounds, they said. Almost 300 arrests. An impressive stat, an equally impressive job. But, a telling one.

Before I get to that point, let's contrast the manner of law enforcement operations for crack use. Crack is the black man's drug, by and large. Its use is more prevalent among black people as meth is more prevalent among whites.

Where I work, and where I've lived and seen, police officers park in the parking lots of public places in predominantly black neighborhoods and just sit and watch. They open outposts in housing projects and cruise or walk the neighborhoods where black people live in larger numbers than whites. They are a constant presence. The people who live in these neighborhoods know the cops by first name. Go to the store? Police car sitting there. Stop for gas? Police car sitting there. Walking the street because you don't drive? Two or three police cars slow down as they pass you walking, and the officers stare at you suspiciously, or even stop and talk with you -- and ask questions about where you're going, what you're doing, who with? And, when you're walking back? Same thing. Of course, if you're sitting on your porch, as poor black people tend to do around here, you watch this happen in front of your house or maybe half a block down the street any number of times in a typical week.

Yes, crack is bought, sold, made and used. People are breaking the law. And, it is a vicious addiction that ruins lives. Blacks are credited by the USDOJ with being a prime source of marijuana sales, too, along with Mexican organizations.

In 2007, cocaine and marijuana seizures in Alabama added up to a total of 1,165 kilos. Meth seizures -- 8 kilos, according, again, to the USDOJ.
The white man's drug of choice is expensive to get to, harder to man operations for, more dangerous to clean up, and seized in miniscule quantities compared to the black man's drug of choice. The black man's drug of choice is like picking up walnuts from the ground in November, comparatively speaking.

But, let us look at some more stats. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services survey for 2004-2005 indicates the following differences in drug use (not arrests, use) percentages of white and black populations for one month in that period.

Whites 12 and older using any illicit drug: 8.1%
Blacks 12 and older using any illicit drug: 9.2%

Very, very close percentage, no?

Now, let's compare the number of whites vs. blacks in prison or jail for drug possession/use/sales: In 2004, at year's end, there were roughly 249,000 people in state prisons for drug-related offenses in America. Of those, there were 112,500 blacks and 65,900 whites. Blacks were 45.1% of the state prison population, whites were 26.4%, again according to the USDOJ, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

As a percentage of their respective populations, blacks and whites are roughly equal in their use of drugs. Yet, blacks outnumber whites almost 2 to 1 in raw numbers in prisons for violating the same laws.

The only explanation for this is the method of enforcement. No one keeps stats that I can find on 'how' law enforcement officers net their collars. There is no readily available hard data to demonstrate that the bulk of arrests come from methods used in black neighborhoods vs. those used in white neighborhoods other than the number of blacks in prison vs. the numbers of whites in prison. And, that is a pretty reliable indicator of which method is used most.

The question is why. One reason could be money. Remember the sophistication and cost of catching meth labs vs. the simplicity and ease of simply trolling the streets of black neighborhoods?

But, what would happen to the meth problem if the same resources were, in fact, directed with the same enthusiasm at meth dealers and users as they are aimed at crack use/dealers? We don't know. It isn't being done. I venture that it won't. Meth has been around a long, long time. It isn't new. So, it isn't viewed as pervasively serious a problem, even with horrifying, emotional billboard campaigns, as crack. Keep in mind we've got an almost equal percentage of blacks and whites using their respective illcit preferred drugs.

There must be, then, another reason. A more sinister one. One that guarantees somebody something. Power. Security. Funding. All at a lower cost. At the expense of the black man. What a coincidence. Not only at the expense of the black man, but one that keeps him at bay, that keeps him at once both dependent on the government for help because of his sad, cultural lot and leverages that promise of help to stay in power, in control of things, in control of money, not just the black man's money, but everyone's.

Who has the most to lose if the black man is not imprisoned? White liberals who are afraid that black men will learn they can, in fact, lead their families and live productively without white government's help, and who will not be disenfranchised by felony convictions. White conservatives who run for office on the crime and punishment platform who will not have the demonstrative evidence of brand new prisons nor the campaign financing of lobbyists for companies that benefit from the criminal justice industry.

[Pastor Bill]

A good part of it may not be a racial as you think either, at least not racially caused, but a byproduct of environment.

As you stated urban neighborhoods where drugs tend to be a problem are often predominately black, and as you pointed out that draws alot of police presence and arrests, Crack is much more often the drug of choice in these areas (quite possibly due to the manufacturing being more easily detected in close quarters).

On the other hand, in many areas where Meth is a big problem (like the area I am in) it tends to be rural areas, with smaller police forces patrolling larger physical areas. Leaving Law enforcement at more of a disadvantage and arrest rates lower. When theirs more room to hide, it's harder to be found.

[scooter]

I think whites just hide there drug use better.

Could it be partly attributed to the brazen nature of drug use within black communities?

I mean ain't nobody sitting in lawn chairs selling crack in my front yard.

It is partly due do to sheer stupidity.

[dolfan]

A good part of it may not be a racial as you think either, at least not racially caused, but a byproduct of environment.

As you stated urban neighborhoods where drugs tend to be a problem are often predominately black, and as you pointed out that draws alot of police presence and arrests, Crack is much more often the drug of choice in these areas (quite possibly due to the manufacturing being more easily detected in close quarters).

On the other hand, in many areas where Meth is a big problem (like the area I am in) it tends to be rural areas, with smaller police forces patrolling larger physical areas. Leaving Law enforcement at more of a disadvantage and arrest rates lower. When theirs more room to hide, it's harder to be found.

But, you've just made my point, Pastor Bill. Police go where the blacks are, not where the whites are. It is easy pickin'. It generates job demand and insures job security. Meth is ravaging whites. Black arrest rates and incarceration rates are not yielding any in comparison. Blacks live closer and act more openly and interpersonally in their criminal enterprises than rural whites --- okay, is that an excuse for staying put in the black neighborhoods? They're easier to catch? I thought crime prevention was about combating a moral or social evil, not keeping bureaucratic nests feathered. But, you see, that's exactly what it IS about. It is so by design. If this were merely incidental, systemic and happenstance, I'd agree. Did blacks only begin to use drugs after the civil rights era? Overall, blacks and Latinos percentages of total crimes committed in America are at roughly equal levels to what they were before 1964, as is that of whites; since 1964, the percentage of dark-skinned people in jails and prisons has doubled and the percentage of whites inside has been reduced by half. I don't find that coincidental.

[Pastor Bill]

No, you missed my point. Police go where they have the most concentration of crime, they can park in one spot and be within a 1 mile radius of 100 drug dealers, whereas in areas like where I am, and Meth is running rampant, they would have to be in areas where there wouldn't be 100 people in a 1 mile radius.

Much of this is geographical, and that was my point.

[dolfan]

No, you missed my point. Police go where they have the most concentration of crime, they can park in one spot and be within a 1 mile radius of 100 drug dealers, whereas in areas like where I am, and Meth is running rampant, they would have to be in areas where there wouldn't be 100 people in a 1 mile radius.

Much of this is geographical, and that was my point.

So, the out of kilter proportions of black arrests, convictions and imprisonments is simply a function of convenience. And, that's okay? That's too easy. And, it isn't working: they aren't making a dent in it either way. (Which, in itself, is reason to doubt the policy and strategy.)

And, it defies some logic. Let's look at your example. Scattered population, rampant meth. Do police set up permanent offices and stakeouts and constant surveillance there? No. Isn't that the place most devoid of their deterring presence? Wouldn't you say so? The fallback position is unacceptable: that it is just too easy to pass up on the blacks. What of suburban whites where meth is also raging? No police occupation in those neighborhoods, not really even a whiff of their exhaust in the air. So, here we are again: why is it that the blacks are targeted for this disparate treatement? And, if even white liberals pretend to buy-in to these ideas of the need for racial justice, you'd think that the most politically opportunistic target for them would be exactly this one thing --- pervasive police presence in black neighborhoods. If you got some of these left-wingers to do something about it, they'd all be running for president and getting votes. But, it isn't a target. It is a disfavored topic of public conversation! Why all that squirming? Because there is an inate sense that something wrong is being done over on black people, but there is complicity on the part of the left-wing media with big-government types in both parties. They all win, except the blacks.

[Pastor Bill]

I don't think you understand how rural of an area I am talking about.

There is nothing to stake out, if they hear of a location to stake out, they just go in and bust them, but they are moving and hiding faster than they can be found.

It's not like doing surveillance on a few city blocks, where a couple of cops can patrol the area in a matter of a few minutes and interact with 50 people in that time, this is out where you could drive for hours to cover the area, and see maybe a couple dozen at most, and most of those would be in vehicles driving past. The same techniques don't work, the number of officers per resident can be the same, but it leaves an urban officer covering a block or two, compared to a rural officer covering 30 square miles.

To compare those as apples to apples just doesn't make sense.

[CantBCoy]

Bill if I'm reading you correctly you feel that it is a matter of demographics. Am I right? I can understand that and it makes sense on another level if you look at it that way as to why there aren't the number of stake outs. Geography. Meth is generally produced and consumed in rural areas, where as crack is produced and consumed in urban areas. Across the board the urban areas have more resources and units to fight their cities' drug problems. In rural america where meth seems to be the drug of choice for white people the resources and numbers just aren't there. Therefore when you look at the demographics african-americans live mostly in the urban areas and the whites live mostly in the rural sub-urban areas. I could be wrong but I do think this has a lot to do with it.

[Pastor Bill]

Yes, but in addition to that, not just do they have less resources, they are covering larger geographical areas, rather than having 30 drug dealers within less than 1 square mile, you'd have basically the same population, and same number of drug dealers spread out over 50-100 square miles. Even with the same resources that would be a more difficult task.

[Dr. Ron]

Pastor Bill is absolutely correct on this one.

dolfan, as much as I admire and respect you, you really DID buy into all that crap Obama was selling.....or so it appears.

The number of blacks vs. whites in prisons is not related to drug USE but rather Drug Sales and distribution.

I was prison chaplain and am still connected to the system. My wife is administrative assist. to the Warden at the Special needs prison here in Nashvill. She was with Internal Affairs for DOC for 5 years.

Your argument may be significant as reference to drug use....maybe...but for the number in prison because of drug related felonies, the black community see it as an easy way to get rich and they are less afraid of imprisonment. The meth issue is totally different. Again, you can't compare apples to oranges.

My grandfather was a "shine maker". He was killed my the "revenuers" ! Or however you spell it. But shine stills were hidden way deep in the forrest as a rule and it took more man hours to find and bust them than to catch people running truck loads of labled whiskey. There was a disproportionate number of Italians in prisons during prohibition days.

Do we target the poor black man??? No the black men who wind up in my wife's facility are not poor.....they have to leave the Benz at home while they do time......and the black woman prison population is the same....

White colar crime.....identity theft is on the rise in the black community too. Again....the preachers need to start preaching something besides a "one sided " view of a salvery they have never known and preach the amazing Grace of God.

I am not a racist. My family was involved in the Civil Rights movement years before you were born. I pastored a black church in Nashville when I was 16......in 1962...before the Civil rights movement.....but I will not allow any one of any race to blame someone else for their wrong doing.

[dolfan]

Pastor Bill, if they ever used that as a rationale for their enforcement policies, they'd be out of work. That is one of the most racially-based reasons imaginable.

"Black people live closer together than rural whites, so that's where we're going." I don't think so. You may as well say, and it means the same thing in practical terms, "Good thing all those black folks live right there together. Cuts down on our traveling time. If you ask me, we're saving the taxpayers' money." The law doesn't work --- constitutionally --- that way. There mustn't be a discriminatory enforcement. That enforcing it in black communities is easier because violations are easier to spot than picking up candy is no excuse.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a black judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, considered staunchly conservative and a darling of the conservative talk set, said this last year in an opinion on searches and seizures and reasonableness of them in black neighborhoods: "prudent constraints on police conduct have been forgotten in our frustration over city life plagued with drug trafficking and violent crime. As a result, what we are now tempted to enforce is . . . the rule that, in a high-crime neighborhood, being young, male, and black creates reasonable, articulable suspicion [for police to stop an individual]." She was actually in dissent on an opinion that approved a stop. Her point is spot on, and it describes the kind of thought process that our government has lead us to buy into -- that the evil of drugs is greater than the evil of inequality of the enforcement of laws. Everytime a balancing test is done, the law wins. Courts put their thumb on the scales to ensure that the legislative and executive policies are completed. In black neighborhoods, the real crime is being there, and the due process suggested by the likes of those who think pervasive police presence is just part of the deal is live with it or leave.

In Kimbrough v. U.S., a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case, the Court ruled --- the conservative court --- ruled that federal sentencing guidelines regarding crack cocaine were practically unfair on racial terms when compared to their application for those punished for powder cocaine offenses, and approved federal courts sentencing below the guidelines in such cases. Deviation from federal sentencing guidelines is a serious matter; it is rare. One flaw the Court found with sentencing guidelines on crack: the sentencing commission did not take account of “empirical data and national experience." In other words, the scales were tipped in favor of whites and against blacks. If it is bad enough for this Court to change the way the game is played, it is bad.

By that line of thought, we can't reject "empirical data and national experience" in weighing the racially unust enforcement of drug laws in terms of police presence and the sheer numbers of blacks in prison. That empirical data includes, not excludes, the proximity of blacks to one another.

[Pastor Gary]

Might I inject a possible factor that is being ignored?

Is it possible that the concentration of police presence (with the resultant higher arrest, conviction and incarceration rates) is at least partially due to the intensified amount of violent crime (armed robbery, murder, drive-by shootings, etc.) associated with drug traffic among black citizens, as opposed to the drug traffic among non-black citizens?

It would be naive and disingenuous to ignore black-on-black crime as a factor in police presence, since African-American community leaders are often heard pleading for greater police presence to protect the decent, law-abiding black citizenry from the thugs who plague their neighborhoods. I may not get the quote or source exactly right, but "the boys in the hood have killed more blacks than the boys wearing hoods ever did."

[Pastor Bill]

Wait a minute there dolfan, I was NOT promoting this as a racial thing at all, but a geographical issue, if blacks were rural and the whites urban, we'd see the exact opposite statistics. It's not about profiling, it's about the ability to get caught, you are 20 times more likely to get caught selling drugs in a populated area than in a rural area, not due to race, not due to targetting or profiling, just the fact that there is less places to hide, more witnesses, and yes more police presence.

You can try to make this about race all you want, the fact is crack is an urban drug, and meth is a rural drug. That's the problem. Believe me I live in an area plagued by meth, I have family working on drug task forces and prayer teams to try to battle it, but the fact is it's harder to find someone hiding in 150 acres of woods, than it is sitting on a street corner. and to even narrow it down to that 150 acres you'd have pinned it down to a specific address.

[dolfan]

Dr. Ron, I'm not saying that the laws are wrong because black people happen to be likely to break them. I'm not saying that if they break the law they shouldn't answer for it simply because of the policy. Each one arrested, if proven to have broken the law in the course of due process and found guilty, should be subjected to the punishment of the law at the hands of a justice-seeking judge. Plain and simple. No excuses of "I did it because I'm black and disadvantaged."

My point is this. Obama spoke to the experience of black people and it being a source of anger at America. I think that experience is truly horrid, and I think America is responsible. We have intentionally created laws to enslave black people. We enforce those laws in ways that are most likely to keep black people under our thumbs and nursing at our breast, while at the same time making wealthy those who we pay to build our infrastructure to enable us to so act, and making powerful those we elect and appoint to make and administer the laws and rules. The black community has not been freed, has not been given opportunity, has not been given basic privacy to flourish when it is under the ever suspicious eye of law enforcement, pursued 24 hours a day in its own backyard by armed men charged with finding and putting into custody black men and women, and placed in jail at more than 5 times rate of their white and equally guilty counterparts, whose neighborhoods are left largely alone except for when the police are called out to them.

This is not about Obama. He said something that is true in all of the other things he said earlier this week. We cannot even bring ourselves to the thought that he could be right, that we could be just this depraved that we would deliberately arrange our society in such a way as to deprive an entire race of fellow citizens of the basic, most taken-for-granted rights and liberties we hold to passionately for ourselves. Statistics won't convince us. Laws won't convince us. Stories and even eyewitness accounts of it won't convince us. We are America, the greatest country on Earth, and this just can't be true. We dare not even approach the morality of the question whether it is worth it to society to utilize drug laws in this way to crush black people versus decriminalizing drugs. We dare not consider the history of failed Prohibition or to compare it to the present distress of narcotics ---- because we actually like alcohol or even if we don't drink it, we like those who do well enough not to let it cloud our moral judgment about doing justice and acting mercifully toward our neighbor before God, and we minimize its effects and costs to society so we never have to answer that question about drug policy. We will walk 100 miles to support this illusion rather than stand flat footed and say the truth. This is not about Barack Obama being right or wrong --- what he said about race and the reasons for anger do have some truth in them; not completely, because he wants to blame it in part of not enough government and not enough spending. He is part of the problem at this point, not the solution. But, that doesn't make everything he said that was right somehow not right. And on this issue of law enforcement and drug laws and incarceration rates among blacks, he was right. Yet, he could've just as easily, as most politicians do, taken another road with that, and he's not beyond taking the expedient road (reference his treatment in the same speech about Rev. Wright). So, this is not about me buying Obama. He didn't wake anybody up to this truth; that'd be giving him far too much credit. But, I do think he'd like to make it an issue of discussion, and that is more than anyone else is doing about it, and I do support that. I still wouldn't vote for him.