| Chapter 4
Racial and Ethnic Issues
By
Melissa Moore
Introduction
Racial and ethnic issues can be some of the most complex and troubling
for reporters covering crime and justice. For crime reporters, these
issues exist on at least two levels. The first is that race, racial
bias, and racial discrimination are huge concerns in policing today.
To cover policing in your community well, you cannot avoid them
– even if, and particularly if, the agencies you cover are
avoiding them. The second is that how journalists handle issues
of race and ethnicity varies tremendously from newspaper to newspaper,
television station to television station. Our coverage itself is
often the subject of debate and is subject to allegations of bias
and discrimination.
To complicate matters, most Americans, regardless of their color
or background, are not comfortable discussing the realities of race
in America and in the criminal justice system. The aggrieved are
most likely to talk about it, but that alone doesn't make for thorough,
balanced reporting. It's critical, and sometimes quite difficult,
to seek out the opinions and views of the powerful and to hold them
accountable when those views do not reflect the interests of the
community or when those views do not match with reality.
Issues of race and crime can be politically and emotionally charged.
To best serve readers and viewers, reporters should ensure that
the information their stories add to the debate is both accurate
and fair.
It's important to realize that what reporters choose to include
in the stories they cover helps shape public perception of race
and crime issues.
In many communities, people of one race are unlikely to mix on
a daily basis with people of another race. One way each race learns
about the other is through the media. Crime coverage is of tremendous
interest to people of all races and may affect their perceptions,
even when that is not what the writer intended.
Race, Crime and Poverty
In many minds, the image of a dangerous, violent criminal is that
of a young black man. Advocates for the vast majority of young black
men who are not criminals blame the media in part for this image.
The FBI Uniform Crime Reports track reported crime and arrests
for most U.S. law enforcement agencies. The reporting system is
incomplete, but it provides some insight into who is being arrested
for crimes.
The FBI reported 9,306,587 arrests for everything more serious
than traffic offenses nationwide in 2001. Of those arrested, 69.5
percent were white and 28.1 percent black.
The 2000 Census shows that about 75.1 percent of the more than
281 million residents of the U.S. are white and about 12.3 percent
are black, so black people in 2001 were arrested at more than twice
their proportion of the population.
The FBI reports do shed some interesting light on who is getting
arrested. Murder arrests were almost evenly divided between black
and white, with 4,561 white people arrested for murder or non-negligent
manslaughter and 4,585 black people arrested for those crimes.
In every category of violent crime except robbery, black people
were arrested disproportionately more than their share of the population,
but still in far fewer numbers than white people. For robbery, 53.8
percent of those arrested are black and 44.5 percent are white.
All together, there were 260,983 arrests of whites in 2001 for
violent crimes – which include murder, rape, robbery and aggravated
assault – and 163,192 arrests of blacks. For the property
crimes of burglary, theft, auto theft and arson, there were 738,080
arrests of whites and 350,879 arrests of blacks.
For drug offenses, believed by many to a particular source of racial
disparity in the justice system, of just over one million arrests,
64.2 percent were white and 34.5 percent black.
The Sentencing Project, a national organization devoted to examining
the effects of incarceration and its potential alternatives, says
that it is easy for police to arrest drug dealers who hang out on
street corners and the customers who purchase their wares. Because
they are easier to arrest than more affluent suburbanites who deal
drugs by word of mouth in private spaces, the urban dealers are
more likely to develop criminal records and subject themselves to
longer sentences when they are arrested again.
Are
Blacks Over-Arrested for Drug Violations?
Drawing on several federal reports from the late 1990s, the Sentencing
Project concluded that while blacks comprised about 13 percent of
all people who use drugs at least once a month, but they were 35
percent of state-level drug possession arrests, 53 percent of convictions
and 58 percent of those in prison on drug convictions.
These numbers may not reflect arrest rates in your community, but
you should be able to obtain at least the FBI data for each agency
you cover.
The report that the department sends to the FBI for national tabulations
is called the "Age, Sex and Race" form; each agency that
participates in the Uniform Crime Reporting program submits two
forms each month. One covers arrests of people under 18. The other
covers arrests of people 18 and over. The same information is available
from the FBI, although usually not so quickly.
You can also purchase these data, and other FBI Uniform Crime Reports
figures, for your area, state or the nation from the National Institute
for Computer Assisted Reporting at http://www.nicar.org.
Click on "Database Library" and then "Government
Database Collection" to see what is available. Prices are based
on newspaper circulation or television market ranking.
This data may make a standalone story when you first get it, but
they also serve as excellent background material to inform other
stories you write about arrests and crime rates.
Arrest data can tell you the race of people arrested for crimes.
They can't tell you the race of the criminals in the vast majority
of crimes that remain unsolved.
Also, arrest data, particularly in drug cases, tell you more about
where police chose to look for drug use and drug dealing than where
it actually is happening.
Much of the data can be used to get an idea of who, in terms of
race and ethnicity, is committing crimes in your community. But
it can't tell you why.
The intersection of race, crime and poverty is part of explaining
the whys. The 2001 Current Population Survey report from the U.S.
Census Bureau called "Poverty in the United States" says
that in 2001, the poverty rate was 7.8 percent for non-Hispanic
whites, 22.7 percent for blacks and 21.4 percent for Hispanic.
Many factors relative to race, poverty and crime are circular and
cyclical.
Poor people often do not have significant political clout and have
a difficult time getting their voices heard in government.
The Sentencing Project estimates that 13 percent of black men cannot
vote as a consequence of a felony conviction. People who can't vote
are not likely to participate much in the governmental process.
The black conviction rate is so high that nearly one in seven black
men age 25-29 was in state or federal prison or a local jail, the
Sentencing Project reported in 2001. The federal Bureau of Justice
Statistics says that the lifetime chance of going to prison for
men born in 1991 is 29 percent for black men, 16 percent for Hispanic
men and four percent for white men.
High incarceration rates of black men, and the lost job opportunities
that follow felony conviction and prison stints, mean that large
numbers of black women cannot find husbands. They wind up raising
children alone.
Women-headed households are, on the whole, far more likely to live
in poverty. Census data from 1999 show that 9.2 percent of families
overall live below poverty level. Of families headed by women, 26.5
percent live below poverty level.
As part of a double whammy for black men who have been to prison,
the decreased job opportunities increase the odds that they will
return to criminal activity.
As a reporter, you can find good stories looking beyond the numbers
to the whys. Put yourself in the position of a person who fits into
the statistics you're writing about, or better yet, talk to some
people in that position. Their voices often are not included in
our stories, but we and readers will benefit from the wisdom of
their experiences.
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