Disparate Arrest Rates II

Bill Cosby raised eyebrows in some quarters in May 2004 when he exhorted a black-tie African-American audience to tone down the rhetoric blaming the majority society for black inner-city ills and to look instead to the undesirable behaviors of some underclass blacks.

Cosby’s comments put a prominent African American face on an issue percolating for some time among serious students of criminal violence. The question is: To what extent can the violence afflicting America’s inner cities be traced to structural circumstances; or, can it be shown to originate in a “subculture of violence” in the affected communities?

In other words, how much of the violence is due to poverty and other external conditions like mistreatment by the dominant society including the police; and how much emanates from forces at work within the community culture involved, by whatever means the behaviors came to be there?

 In fact, both forces are at work. The question is still important, however, because any solution to the plague of criminal violence affecting America’s inner cities would necessarily be influenced by which side of the equation the answer is weighted toward. To the extent that structural considerations predominate, the larger society will have to change its act. If a “subculture of violence” explanation is more fitting, then the minority community will also have to make some changes.

Not everyone agrees with Cosby. University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Eric Dyson has written a book titled “Is Bill Cosby Right?” Dyson, who quite obviously subscribes primarily to a structural explanation for inner city violence, answers his own question with a resounding “No.”

Other African American thinkers have weighed in with positions closer to Cosby’s side, notably  Juan Williams with his Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About it and John McWhorter’s Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America.

The whole matter becomes particularly relevant to San Franciscans in light of a December 17, 2006 San Francisco Chronicle report stating that arrest rates for African Americans in San Francisco were much higher than those for other large California cities.

 The statistics posed a two part question according to the report: “Is the high arrest rate of African Americans because of the way the San Francisco Police Department does its policing, or because of criminal activity within the community?” Put another way, the paper asked whether the higher rates could traced to structural roots or to a community subculture of violence.

            Some observers, including police officials, suggested, among other reasons for the disparate rates, that wealthy San Francisco serves as magnet for criminals from less prosperous communities around the Bay. Others immediately concluded that the disparity could most likely be explained by the fact that San Francisco police officers were profiling minority people to a disproportionate degree, particularly African Americans.

            To get to the bottom of the issue, the city hired University of South Florida Professor Lori Fridell to study the issue. Professor Fridell, an expert on police profiling, examined the issue for several months. Her report is in and now we have the answers to our questions. Or do we?

            The 93 page single-spaced report covers a lot of ground and ends with a number of specific recommendations. But on the original narrow question -- that of why the disparity exists--the report comes up short.  On that point, Professor Fridell concludes that “arrest disparities such as those found by the Chronicle cannot answer the question of whether policing in the city is racially biased.”

The reason for that, she explains, is the presence of what she calls the “missing denominator.” “We have lots of data about crime,” she reports, “(however) we have no true measures of who is committing crime; that is we do not have valid information on the characteristics of people who commit crime. Without this information, we can identify disparities in arrests, but we cannot isolate the cause.” What’s needed, she says, to make an adequate analysis, is not just the representation of African Americans in the city’s residential population, but “their representation in the population that commits felonies.”

            Professor Fridell then gets into a lengthy discussion of racially biased policing generally; a more extensive analysis of the problem of insufficient crime data; an evaluation of a more recent problem with vehicle stop data; and concludes with a series of 28 recommendations to implement a program of fair and impartial policing, including training, an advisory board, and a hired consultant, all to make sure that profiling does not take place.

            As to the “missing denominator,” there are in fact indicators, susceptible to analysis, which can help us to understand who is committing crime. The rate of black homicide victimization in San Francisco is fifteen times that of the other communities in the city, and most of the killers, it is generally agreed, are other blacks. More than half the police officers murdered in the line of duty in the last several decades were killed by black men, during a period when on average blacks comprised on average 10 percent of the population.

As to the African American “representation in the community of those committing felonies in the city,” a recent quick-and-dirty analysis of 100 San Francisco robbery cases in one area of the city showed that 98 percent of the victims were Asian and 99 percent of the perpetrators were African Americans. While not regularly reported out, the data to carry the analysis further is still being collected. Until 1989, the San Francisco Police Department reported out criminal perpetrators—not just arrestees-- by race for major types of crime.

Then, for some reason or another, the report was discontinued. In 1989, at a time when African Americans comprised about 11 percent of the population, they were responsible for 58 percent of the homicides, 57 percent of the rapes, and 68 percent of the robberies for which the racial identify of the perpetrator was given.  The report included the same kind of information for other groups as well, which would help with the construction of a matrix to analyze the “community of those committing felonies.”

 In the end, the original question remains unanswered. Should we look to the police or to the community for an explanation of the disparate rates? The professor herself offers suggestions to help with additional study. “I will at various points,” she writes, “indicate how the city, if it chose to pursue these issues further, might investigate them with additional data collection and study,” And she does. However, she continues, the city should not put further research in front of her suggestions about institutional changes to effectuate fair and impartial policing.   

On reflection, one is forced to wonder whether the selection of an expert on profiling was the right person to examine a question to which only one of several possible answers would lead to a finding that racially biased policing was the major reason for the disparity. You can be pretty sure that if you go to a chiropractor with a pain in your elbow, he will find something wrong with your spine

We still don’t know why San Francisco’s African Americans arrest rates are so much higher than those of other large California cities. And I would say that before the city expends a lot of treasure and energy to implement programs which -- while they might be laudable in their own right—do not show a clear path to understand and deal with the disparities which still exist.

 It would do better to pursue the answer to the original question first. And, with that answer in hand, to devise a program that would have a practical effect on the crime rate in the near term.

SFPOA Notebook 5/2007