Police in a No Win Situation – ABC News article questions racial disparity of arrests?
By Dr. Kevin McNamee June 11, 2020
While flying above the the skies of Los Angeles on a warm summer night in the LAPD Air Support Division helicopter, a call of a shooting in Hollywood came in. The pilot makes a quick turn in that direction while the Tactical Flight Officer(TFO) radios back that they are en-route and then begins to pinpoint the crime location on the many maps and GPS.
Victim reports the shooting suspect as African American male, medium height and weight wearing black shirt and blue jeans.
Police units arrive at the scene to interview the victim and witnesses. Report comes back that the suspect headed north towards Franklin Avenue.
Air Support circles the area above finding a person matching the description, walking a few blocks north of the crime. A police unit turning the corner was instructed by the TFO to stop the man who may be the Assault with a Deadly Weapon (ADW) suspect. The man was put in handcuffs and questioned while the airship continued searching the area.
A few minutes later, crime scene officers reported that the victim’s description of the suspect did not match witnesses’s description of two male Hispanics not a lone African American male.
Officer investigation concluded that the victim was purchasing drugs but the deal went bad and the shooting started. The victim gave a bogus description.
Air Support notified the officers holding the African American male just north of the crime scene, asked the man be thanked for his cooperation and explain that he fit the description of a suspect.
Was the detained African American male targeted by the police because he was “black” or was it because he fit the suspect description?
ABC News thinks it is the latter suggesting that police may be targeting black people. It based this conclusion on and FBI report that “in 800 jurisdictions, black people were arrested at a rate five times higher than white people in 2018, after accounting for the demographics of the cities and counties those police departments serve.”
The article goes on to say, “In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.”
What the ABC News article does not say is police officers do not have psychic abilities to predict crime and arrive like Superman to save the day. Police go to where the crime occurs and that is when the good people in the community call for police services to stop crime in their neighborhood. Absent these request for police, the police would not go there.
However, Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, sees the situation much differently. She says the data reveals a “pervasive problem.”
Clarke says, “We have to deal with the over-policing of low-income African American communities in our country,” Clarke told ABC News. “When we see data that shows that African Americans are singled out, unfairly targeted, disproportionately subject to arrest and prosecution — that should sound an alarm.”
Metropolitan police resources are sent to areas with high crime keeping those communities safe but this also removes police resources from the less crime ridden areas of the city. Said another way, areas with less crime are under served but pay for the police resources used in the city’s high crime areas. Usually these are areas of high drop-out rates, poverty, drug sales, high unemployment, welfare and fatherless-single parent homes.
If Kristen Clarke gets her way with less policing in the low-income African American communities to solve the “over policing”, then crime skyrockets and police are criticized for not doing their job.
The police can’t win in this situation.
It comes back to values and standards we hold in ourselves and community.
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