Quote:
Originally Posted by mongidig
Why do police treat black people differently from white people? Is it really because they dont like the color of their skin?
Usually the disparity does not result from animus between police and people of color, though that is always a threat to flare up. Police treat black people differently due to combination of inherent bias shared by most people in society and the enormous discretion police officers are allowed.
As to the bias, one study (citation available upon request) found that like 95% of people, when asked to imagine a drug user, imagines a black person. We know from several sources, including surveys and ER admissions data on overdosing, that blacks and whites abuse illegal drugs at the same rate. Since blacks are only 13% of the population, we know that the vast majority of drug abusers are white. So the fact that 95% of people picture a black person when asked to imagine a drug abuser is an indication of a tremendous, unfair prejudice.
Cops are people too, and have biases. When you give cops a mandate to "get the drug users" they will, like everyone else, picture black people as drug users/dealers (about the same proportion of whites are drug dealers as blacks as well,though that is not as confirmed AFAIK) and subsequently target and harass black people unfairly, often under the false but earnest belief that black people are disproportionately guilty.
It helps to know that most of the recent problems between black people and police are pursuant to the drug war and the militarization of police.
declaration of war on drugs out of nowhere by Reagan (crime was going down and rugs weren't an issue in public opinion), buttressed by Clinton again for no benevolent reason
-> legal support for war on drugs included an attack by SCOTUS of rights which allowed for stop and frisk and other unconstitutional flexibility for law enforcement
-> sentencing for drug crimes became harsher and inflexible and blatantly racialized (harsher sentences for crack than other forms of cocaine)
-> cocaine started flowing into the country, arranged in large part by the CIA to illegally fund the Contras
-> police departments were massively incentivized with federal money and military equipment to prioritize the drug war over conventional crime
-> police were guided by common racial prejudices in prosecuting the drug war to target blacks resulting in the unholy mess you see today.
The key thing to remember is that the overwhelming majority of the increase in prosecutions and incarcerations over the last few decades were due to the drug war. Drug enforcement is not like other law enforcement in that, with drugs, all participants are (more or less) willing parties. It's not like a murder where someone calls the police and then they investigate it. With drugs, cops have a huge amount of discretion as to where to look and who to go after. In that use of discretion they choose to go after black people not because they are extra prejudice per say, but because they are just as prejudice as everyone else (though I would guess they are a little more so because they tend to be lower IQ and to reinforce their own prejudices constantly).