Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  The racial disparities in American prisons are so glaring that many scholars and advocates, influenced by Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, see mass incarceration as just the latest manifestation of the same white supremacist impulses that once allowed enslaved black people to be viewed as chattel. In this school of thought, the primary function of the US criminal justice system is to prevent black people from ever gaining access to the same privileges white Americans take for granted.

  This is not a view that’s popular among police officers.

  “That’s just bullshit!” Murphy objected when I described Alexander’s work one night during a particularly slow period. “It’s crap, and it’s offensive. Race has nothing to do with the decisions I make.” He was indignant. “I get it—people who don’t know me might think, ‘Oh, you’re a white officer and all you ever do is arrest black people,’ but I don’t, like, profile people or something. I don’t stop or arrest people because they’re black; when I arrest them it’s because they’re committing crimes. Crimes against other black people! Anyway, practically everyone who lives here is black, so any profiling I do goes the exact opposite way—I see a white person around here who’s not a cop, and I think: Either that’s some kind of social worker or that asshole is up to no good. Buying drugs, mostly. Because trust me, white people don’t come here to admire the fucking view.”

  Auguste was just as insistent: “It has nothing to do with race. My skin’s black too, but you don’t see me fucking people up for a few bucks. These people here, they’re just messed up. It’s like they like being bad, like they think being bad is good. Nobody makes these people act like they do. They don’t like it here, they should fix their neighborhoods, or leave.”

  Jeremiah, another black officer, also didn’t think much of Michelle Alexander’s theories. “That lady’s just wrong. I’m sorry, I’m sure she’s really smart, but she’s wrong. She should come out here and ride with us sometime. She should check out ShotSpotter.”

  ShotSpotter is a gunfire detection system that uses audio sensors to detect the distinctive acoustic signature of gunshots in real time, and it’s tied into the DC police dispatching system.

  “When ShotSpotter sends out an alert for sounds of gunshots, we go to where the gunshots are. How is that racist?” Jeremiah demanded. “ShotSpotter can’t tell the color of the person firing the gun. And what does she want us to do, ignore the 911 calls from black neighborhoods because if we go, we might have to arrest black people? The people calling 911 are black too. Don’t black people have a right to have us come when they call?”

  Such views aren’t unique to police officers. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2017 book, Locking Up Our Own, James Forman Jr. wrote about the evolution of criminal law in Washington, DC, and the ways in which many of the city’s black leaders led the call for “tough on crime” measures. “To understand why,” he writes, “we must start with a profound social fact. . . .” Beginning in the 1960s, “black communities were devastated by historically unprecedented levels of crime and violence.” In response, DC’s black leaders “exhibited a complex . . . mix of impulses.” Though some had “sympathy for the plight of criminal defendants, who they knew were disproportionately black,” that sympathy “was rarely sufficient to overcome the claims of black crime victims, who often argued that a punitive approach was necessary to protect the African-American community—including many of its most impoverished members—from the ravages of crime.”

  The result, writes Forman, was a majority-black city led by mostly black elected officials—who nonetheless passed laws and pursued policies that led to the arrest and imprisonment of mostly poor black people, in the name of protecting other black people from crime. But although the tough-on-crime policies advanced by many black leaders were motivated by a desire to protect black crime victims, such policies did nothing to address the grinding poverty that fueled DC’s high crime rates—and that was itself substantially caused by centuries of racially discriminatory laws and practices.

  This is why racism seems like a nonissue to many street cops; it’s baked so deeply into the system that it’s invisible. Cops in DC’s Seventh District see the poverty, hopelessness, and the crime, but they don’t see that 7D is a mostly black neighborhood because the segregationist policies of previous decades forced blacks out of many other parts of the city (and today, rapid gentrification west of the Anacostia River is pushing still more poor African Americans into southeast DC, the last part of the city with anything close to affordable home prices). Cops see 7D’s battered liquor stores and convenience stores, but they don’t see the decades of tax rules and subsidies that gave supermarket chain stores an incentive to locate in wealthier, whiter parts of town. They see the joblessness that drives people to drugs and crime, but they don’t see the decisions about the placement of bus and subway lines that leave many of the city’s poorest people facing long, complex, costly commutes to get to where the jobs are.

  Nationwide, centuries of overt discrimination have left African Americans still struggling to overcome enormous race-based disparities in educational attainment, employment, health, and economic well-being. In recent decades, the United States has seen the rise of an increasingly visible black middle class, but on average, African Americans still have shorter life expectancies than white Americans. They’re more likely to be unemployed, less likely to finish high school or college, more likely to live in poverty, and more likely to end up in prison. Black Americans are also some three times more likely than white Americans to become homicide victims or victims of other violent crimes.

  It’s not just a matter of the long-term structural impact of slavery and segregation. There’s still plenty of active and virulent race-based discrimination in American society. Some of it is overt—antiblack hate crimes have risen in recent years—but much of it comes from deeply rooted stereotypes or from what researchers call implicit bias: prejudicial attitudes we may not even consciously know we hold.

  Thus, employers are less likely to hire job applicants with “African American–sounding names” than applicants with “white-sounding names,” even when their résumés are otherwise identical. Similarly, studies have found that young white males with felony convictions on their records are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black males with identical qualifications—and no criminal records. Even African American children often don’t receive the benefit of the doubt. The death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by a police officer while playing with a toy gun, is a particularly tragic case in point, but a 2014 report published by the US Department of Education found that as early as preschool, black children are punished in school more often and more severely than their white classmates.

  Another 2014 study found that black children are assumed to be older and “less innocent” than their white counterparts. In the study, college students and police officers were asked to look at photos of black and white children and assess their age and potential culpability; when shown photos of children and told that the children were felony suspects, the college students overestimated the age of both the white and black children, but they overestimated the black children’s age by more than twice as much as they overestimated the age of white children. Shown the same photos, police officers underestimated the white children’s age by nearly a year, but made the same age errors as college students when assessing photos of black children, believing them to be, on average, about 4.5 years older than they actually were.

  When it comes to crime and punishment, the glaring racial disparities in both crime commission and crime victimization rates stem from poverty as well as from race. Across all races, the poor are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated than the more affluent. (In part, this is simply because the crimes of the poor are easier to detect than those of the more affluent. In urban areas, the poor have little private space, and crimes are more likely to be commit
ted within sight or hearing of others. White-collar crimes may be just as harmful, but are more easily concealed. When a wallet is stolen in an armed robbery, the crime is immediately apparent; when cyber fraud, identify theft, and insider trading occur, victims may not realize a crime has occurred for months or years.) Americans living in poverty were more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes as Americans living in high-income households.

  But poverty and race are difficult to disentangle. In the United States, wealth inequalities are bound up with the legacy of racial discrimination in numerous and complex ways. Rates of violent victimization were similar for poor blacks and poor whites, for instance—but black American families are three times more likely than white families to live in poverty.

  Ultimately, argues James Forman Jr., class matters as well as race, and while Michelle Alexander’s Jim Crow analogy is powerful, it obscures class divisions within the black community. “Although mass incarceration harms black America as a whole, its most direct victims are the poorest, least educated blacks. While the lifetime rate of incarceration . . . for African American high school dropouts” has skyrocketed, Forman writes, it has “actually decreased slightly for black men with some college education,” and these class dynamics affected the willingness of black leaders to promote tough-on-crime policies.

  Similar class dynamics were often evident in the comments I heard from police officers. When my black colleague Auguste and his medic friend called 7D residents “animals” who should be “clipped” so they couldn’t reproduce, their disdain had more to do with class than race. This is also why increasing the diversity of police departments is no panacea—implicit biases, class divisions, and powerful internal behavioral norms often combine to make minority police officers act in ways that are little different from those of their white peers. (Some studies suggest, for instance, that black and Hispanic police officers are slightly more likely to shoot people of color than white officers.)

  Media attention tends to focus on “bad cops,” those who deliberately harass black people; those who are trigger-happy with Tasers or guns; those who—like Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who killed George Floyd—sneer at the pain and misery they inflict on others. Those cops are out there—far too many of them. But the deeper problem is this: even normal, careful, lawful policing often ends up compounding devastating social inequalities. For police officers, the racism that has shaped the system for so long means that even the most thoughtful and fair-minded police officers—even those who see and decry the structural impact of racism—often face nothing but bad choices.

  Say you’re a street cop, and you apprehend a young black man who robbed an elderly black woman at gunpoint. If you arrest him and he’s convicted of a felony, you’re sending one more young black male into our country’s overcrowded prison system, where he can’t support his family, leaving any children or other dependents struggling in his absence, emotionally and financially. In prison he’s unlikely to have access to education, job training, therapy, or anything else that might help him turn things around when he gets out, and even if he leaves prison with the best intentions, he’s branded for life—job opportunities for former felons are few. In some states, he won’t be able to vote, ever again.

  But if you don’t arrest him, what about the elderly lady he robbed? She’s distraught; she wants justice; she wants you to get violent young men off the streets so she can walk to the corner store without fear. She knows that racism is real and virulent, and its legacy distorts the choices of many young men in her community. You can offer her a copy of The New Jim Crow, but she’s probably not interested in theories of structural racism right now. Right now, she just wants to feel safe in her own neighborhood.

  One Summer Day

  MPD officers responded . . . for possible child abuse. . . . Upon arrival MPD officers made contact with Victim [age 12] who was conscious and breathing suffering from a laceration to the forehead. Victim states he was hit in the head by Suspect with listed item at listed location. Victim and Suspect were involved in a mutual fight which led to Suspect striking Victim in the head with a 5 lb weight. . . . Victim was transported to Childrens Hospital for medical treatment.

  —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report

  Make no mistake: although the flaws in the US criminal justice system are real and numerous, and racism and poverty play a major role in who ends up in prison and who does not, the existence of violent crime is not a right-wing myth dreamed up to justify the incarceration of minorities and the poor. Crime is real—and the misery, pain, and fear engendered by violent crime are visited most often on the very same demographic groups who are disproportionately likely to end up incarcerated.

  It’s easy to forget this, especially if you’re white, affluent, and lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with very little crime. In some quarters of American society, including academia, critiques of the country’s criminal justice system have become so pervasive that a casual listener might be excused for imagining that every arrestee is as worthy as Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread to feed his family in Les Misérables.

  Some arrestees are like Jean Valjean. But many are not. Most criminals are neither martyrs nor sociopaths; they’re just ordinary people who never had many good options, and who stumbled into the worst of them. But their actions hurt other people, often badly.

  Sometimes, it reminded me of the Ugandan and Sierra Leonean child soldiers I had interviewed so many years earlier. Most had been forcibly conscripted and deliberately brutalized. There was no question in my mind that those child soldiers were victims: They hadn’t asked to be press-ganged into rebel armies, and they hadn’t asked to be born into societies riven with violent ethnic and political conflict. But those child soldiers were perpetrators as well as victims. Their actions had brought pain, death, and terror to other innocents. Some of those children wanted nothing more than to return to their peaceful former lives, but others did not—some, traumatized and brutalized for too long, could no longer imagine lives not dedicated to violence.

  I felt much the same about the violent criminals caught up in DC’s criminal justice system. Most had been born into a world where the cards were stacked against them. Discrimination, grinding intergenerational poverty, poor health care, addiction, dysfunctional families, haphazard schools, and little access to jobs left them vulnerable to the blandishments of crime. Many of the people who commit violent crimes have been crime victims themselves, growing up with parental neglect or abuse and the constant threat of robbery and assault. It’s no great surprise that some of the poor and abused end up committing crimes themselves. Robbery and theft are one of the few ways for the very poor to access the toys so ubiquitous among the affluent: iPhones, cars, expensive clothes. For many young men, gangs and informal crews offer protection, a place to belong, and a substitute family to make up for absent or neglectful parents. But like the child soldiers I met in Uganda and Sierra Leone, America’s violent criminals are undeniably perpetrators as well, and their actions cause untold misery to others in their communities.

  Spend an hour skimming through the daily crime reports compiled by MPD and you’ll sense the suffering. Despite the bureaucratic prose, the police jargon, and the omnipresent passive voice, you’ll feel the sheer weight of human pain caused by crime.

  Here’s a list of the serious crimes (assaults, rapes, homicides, carjackings, robberies, burglaries, etc.) reported to the DC Metropolitan Police on a single, randomly chosen summer day in 2019:

  Armed Kidnapping: Complainant reports while walking in the listed location she was approached by an unknown [suspect]. The Suspect brandished a dark-colored handgun and ordered the Complainant to get into the vehicle. The Complainant jumped from the vehicle and was able to take a photo of the tag.

  Assault with a Dangerous Weapon—Knife: On the above listed date and time, Vi
ctim 1 reports that Suspect 1, her boyfriend, entered her residence at . . . and cut her with a foldable pocket knife above the left eye following a dispute over another woman. Witness 1 corroborated Victim 1’s account, stating that Suspect 1 ran toward Victim 1 holding a pocket knife in between his fingers as he slashed at Victim 1’s face. Suspect 1 was last seen fleeing the scene on foot.

  Robbery: Complainant 1 reports . . . she was approached by Suspect 1 and Suspect 2, who began to speak to her in English. Complainant 1 reported that she did not understand what Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 were stating because Complainant 1 does not speak English. . . . Complainant 1 reports that Suspect 1 pulled a black in color handgun and pointed it at her while Suspect 2 grabbed her left arm and then Suspect 2 grabbed her cell phone . . . and backpack out of her hand. Witness 1 reports that he observed Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 flee. . . .

  Robbery/Armed Carjacking: MPD responded . . . for an armed carjacking. Once on scene, Complainant 1 stated that he was with his mother, Reporting Party 1, when they parked the listed vehicle. . . . Complainant 1 stated that they parked the vehicle and started to walk. . . . Complainant 1 states that he forgot his phone in the vehicle and went to return to retrieve it. Complainant 1 states that he went to the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the door, leaned in, and retrieved his phone. Complainant 1 states that when he leaned back out of the car Suspect 1 was standing there with a black semiautomatic handgun pointed to his head. Suspect 1 stated “Get the fuck down on the ground.” Complainant 1 stated that he told Suspect 1 that he did not have anything and tossed the listed property on the ground. Suspect 1 then picked up the listed items and fled in the listed vehicle.