The vast majority of racial profiling incidents in the U.S. by police involve an officer believing they have a situation in which drugs may be involved; possibly resulting in a drug bust.
I want to disprove a myth that black people are inherently criminal by virtue of the statistical number of black people in prison. This piece will attempt to focus on drug related crimes and specifically the discrepancies between white and black drug related crimes and drug use.
For reasons of the time I wish to spend on this subject, statistical data year by year will be correlated out-of-hand. Though I believe the time span in the data is close enough to be pertinent.
"A survey by the Department of Justice in 1999 revealed that while officers disproportionately focused on African American and Latino drivers, they found drugs more often when they searched whites (17%) than when they searched African Americans (8%)."
Source: Amnesty International
A nine percent difference! You would expect a nine percent increase in the number of whites in prison on drug related offenses. But this is not the case because, as stated in the below source, a little more than twice as many blacks and Hispanics were searched as were white drivers. If this percentage were equal we would indeed quite probably find a nine percent increase of whites in prison for drug related offenses.
"The Department of Justice released its own survey, this week, on police contacts with the public. Its findings: More black than white drivers were stopped in 1999 - 12 percent to 10 percent. But more than twice as many blacks and Hispanics were searched when they were pulled over, 11 percent, as opposed to 5 percent for white drivers. 90 percent of those searches uncovered no evidence of criminal wrongdoing."
Source: PBS
We can assume that 90% of the white drivers searched would equally uncover no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Unless you believe that blacks are inherently apt to be criminal; which is what I am attempting to disprove here.
"At midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 black males held in state and federal prisons and local jails, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males."
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics
Let's assume/correlate that these numbers are relatively consistent year by year. And that the numbers reflected in the 1999 report may have even risen by 2008 (I don't have any statistics as yet for that; if anybody would care to look I'd be appreciative) on account of our "War on Terror" and increasing anti-immigrant policies on the Federal, State and local levels.
4.77% of the US black population were in prison.
1.76% of the US hispanic population were in prison.
0.72% of the US white population were in prison.
These percentiles above do not constitute drug offenses.
However:
Among the State prison inmates in 2000:
-- nearly half were sentenced for a violent crime (49%) -- a fifth were sentenced for a property crime (20%) -- about a fifth were sentenced for a drug crime (21%) Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics
On drug use in general:
The 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed that the highest rate of current (past month) illicit drug use was among American Indian/Alaska Natives (13.7%), followed by blacks/African Americans (9.8%), persons reporting two or more races (8.9%), whites (8.5%), Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islanders (7.5%), and Hispanics (6.9%). The lowest rate of current illicit drug use was among Asians (3.6%).
The above quote shows that there is a mere 1.3% difference in drug use between blacks and whites. One would think that this percentile would reflect this in the prison population but it doesn't.
Some final thoughts; as I'm tiring of trying to crunch these numbers, is that blacks and whites would invariably share a relatively equal amount of prison population numbers (as outlined in the above survey; though this statistic doesn't outline actual trafficking) if it weren't for racial profiling. When ninety percent of stops by police officers result in absolutely no results in a search for drugs we can assume that ten percent of the stops of whites (that did not result in a search) were potentially drug related.
I would equally like to explore the realtionship between crime, poverty and education in this post but I think I'll save that for another day.
