Im-Politic: Unwitting Evidence that Criminal Justice Racism Hasn’t Been Systemic Lately

Tags

criminal justice, Ekow Yankah, Im-Politic, incarceration, Keith Humphreys, police, police brutality, policing, prison reform, racism, systemic racism, Washington Post

It’s hard to imagine anything more ordinary in the national media these days than an item making or reporting the claim that the American criminal justice system is plagued with systemic racism. Much harder to imagine: such an article containing evidence powerfully refuting that charge. But that’s exactly what appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section today.

Authors Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University narcotics policy specialist and Ekow N. Yankah, a law professor at New York City’s Yeshiva University tell readers near the beginning of their essay that “the criminal justice system is suffused with racial biases that harm African Americans and Hispanics while favoring Whites.”

They go on to deplore “continuing, pervasive discrimination against African Americans in the criminal justice system and huge disparities in incarceration.” They note that “Blacks…are five times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites.” And they insist that “Race-based critiques of mass incarceration remain essential….”

But weirdly, what the authors themselves recognize as new and important in the national debate about race relations and law enforcement is the official research they report that in jails, which are operated mainly by local governments, “since 2000, the rate of being jailed increased 41 percent among Whites while declining 22 percent among African Americans.”

Further, “Beginning in 2017, the White rate of being jailed surpassed that of Hispanics for the first time in living memory. And in 2018, Whites became 50 percent of the jail population, particularly notable because Whites represent a lower proportion of the U.S. population than they have in centuries.”

As for prisons, which are operated by the states and the federal government, “parallel racial dynamics are evident. The White rate of imprisonment is down only 12 percent in this century, whereas the Hispanic rate has fallen 18 percent and the Black rate is down a remarkable 40 percent. The trend of African Americans leaving prison is accelerating, dropping Black imprisonment rates to levels not seen in 30 years.”

These statistics, remarkable – and neglected – as they are, by no means prove conclusively that racism isn’t too common in American law enforcement, at every level. Indeed, as I wrote last August:

“My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.”

There’s also no shortage of statistical evidence pointing to discriminatory policing and sentencing.

But at or close to the heart of the systemic criminal justice racism charges is the insistence that America’s police and prosecutors and courts consistently and on a national level, all else equal, go after and actually lock up more blacks (and other minorities) than whites. And authors Humphreys and Yankah have made clear – unwittingly, it seems – that

>the exact opposite has been happening;

>that it’s been happening for at least two decades; and

>it continued even after the election as President of one Donald J. Trump, who has not only often been called one of America’s most racist chief executives (including by no less than current President Biden), but whose bigotry is widely supposed to have inspired ever more brazen and terrible brutality by racist cops.

In other words, the data that’s arguably most important show that whatever racism has stained American law enforcement is fading away. If true, hopefully reports describing and amplifying that encouraging trend will become commonplace in the national media, too.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Sorry, but Little Evidence Yet That Trump-onomics Left Blacks Behind

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African Americans, Barack Obama, Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Donald Trump, Economic Policy Institute, Federal Reserve, Labor Department, Labor Force Participation Rate, median household income, median weekly earnings, racial economic justice, racial wealth gap, systemic racism, Tracy Jan, unemployment rate, Washington Post, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

No one should be surprised, much less outraged, if President Biden spends the next year – or four! – blaming the Trump administration for every problem that remains with or emerges in the American economy, or any other dimension of national life. After all, problems do linger from presidency to presidency, and at least as important, it’s the politically expedient road to take — as much history shows.

Less justifiable are journalistic displays of such behavior. But if Tracy Jan’s January 22 Washington Post piece on African Americans and the economy is any indication, not only are four more years of blame-casting in store, but four more years of whoppingly inaccurate and indeed one-sided blame-casting are in store.

Actually, Jan’s article isn’t quite as slanted as the headline, which proclaims “The Trump Economy Left Black Americans Behind.” Readers are told right off the bat, for example, that racial economic gaps have persisted for decades, and that consequently “many black voters” have been “skeptical of the Democratic Party to represent their interests.” The author adds that “unemployment rates for Black people were at a historic low before the coronavirus shutdown, as Trump frequently reminded voters.”

But her dominant themes are that the CCP Virus pandemic has hit black America much harder economically than white, that therefore racial economic disparities have widened during the pandemic, that Trump’s mismanagement of the response was to blame, and that this CCP Virus period failure is enough to warrant labeling his entire term in office a racial economic justice flop.

I’d grade that first claim as largely accurate, as made clear by the impressive evidence Jan cites; the second claim as largely accurate, too; the third claim as more controversial, since it assumes that another President would have fared much better; and the fourth a wild stretch at best.

In fact, even if it is kosher to view 2020 developments as decisive in evaluating the Trump racial economic justice record, and the full range of policies that produced it, it’s important to note that two key indicators showed that the racial economic gap actually narrowed last year – median weekly earnings of full-time workers, and the headline unemployment rate.

Here are the (Labor Department) data for the former, going back to 2009 – the start of the Obama administration, which hasn’t been accused of having a particularly poor racial economic justice record. The numbers are in pre-inflation dollars, and because they come out quarterly, it’s possible to present the figures for the beginnings and ends of the Obama and Trump administrations, and for the CCP Virus period specifically. The ratios between the two are shown as well. 

                               non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black ratio     white-black

2Q 2009:                          757                                 592                             1.28:1

1Q 2017:                          894                                 679                             1.32:1

2Q 2017:                          886                                 689                             1.29:1

1Q 2020:                          980                                 775                             1.26:1

4Q 2020:                       1,007                                 792                             1.27:1

As made clear by the ratio numbers, even counting the pandemic period, weekly pay for the typical black full-time worker rose at a faster rate during the one Trump term than during the two Obama terms. Indeed, during the Obama presidency, the typical black full-time worker fell further behind his or her white counterpart. And between the final pre-virus period last year (the first quarter of 2020) and the final quarter of the year, the gap widened minimally.

The headline unemployment rates that come out monthly (also from the Labor Department) permit an even more precise comparison of the Obama and Trump records, and of the Trump record during the CCP Virus period. And as made clear below, the story they tell (including the ratios presented in the right hand column) isn’t terribly different from that of the weekly pay figures.

                               non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black     white-black

Feb. 09:                              7.6                            13.7                       0.55:1

Jan. 17:                               4.2                             7.4                        0.57:1

Feb. 17:                              4.0                             8.0                        0.50:1

Feb. 20:                              3.5                             6.0                        0.58:1

Dec. 20:                             6.0                             9.9                        0.60:1

The white headline unemployment rate started the Obama years – as the last, post-financial crisis Great Recession was still worsening – at only 55 percent of the rate for blacks. By the final month of his tenure, the white rate had risen to 57 percent of the black rate, meaning that the gap had narrowed slightly. It narrowed significantly faster during the pre-pandemic Trump years, sinces during the former President’s first full month in office, the white rate stood at half the black rate, and hit 58 percent last February, the final full pre-virus month). During the pandemic in 2020, the white-black ratio narrowed even further.

Jan’s narrative is much stronger for data called the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), which gives a more accurate picture of the national employment scene because it reveals and takes into account how many adult Americans have become so discouraged in their search for work that they’ve just given up. The higher the LFPR (also tracked by the Labor Department), the fewer the number of these discouraged workers and vice versa.

                              non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black    white-black

Feb. 09:                            66.2                            62.9                     1.05:1

Jan. 17:                             62.8                            62.2                     1.01:1

Feb. 17:                            62.8                            62.2                     1.01:1

Feb. 20:                            63.2                            63.1                     1.00:1

Dec. 20:                           61.6                            59.8                      1.03:1

These statistics are released monthly (as part of the overall jobs reports) and, as you can see, tend to change only very slowly. But as shown by the dramatic (by these standards) LFPR drop for blacks, the pandemic period has been a stunning exception to the detriment of African Americans. Until then, though, the Obama and Trump results weren’t notably different, especially considering that the former was President twice as long as the latter.

Lots of other relevant statistics only go through 2019, and they don’t exactly scream “Trump failure,” either. Check out one dataset that’s attracted special, and deserved attention – the racial wealth gap. As noted by two other Post writers last year, “More wealth makes for more a comfortable, safer living. And, more importantly, it is passed on to the next generation. Their parents’ wealth gives many white children a boost at birth, an advantage many of their black peers lack.” And my post on the subject at that time expressed full agreement.

The official wealth gap figures come from the Federal Reserve, and are issued only every three years. But since last June (when I first reported on them), we’ve gotten the results (for median households in inflation-adjusted dollars) for 2019. As shown below, they report that although the Obama years saw considerable backsliding, the Trump years showed even greater progress in narrowing disparities:

                               non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black     white-black 

2010:                               144.3                              17.6                    8.20:1

2013:                               146.4                              13.6                  10.76:1

2016:                               181.9                              18.2                    9.99:1

2019:                               188.2                              24.1                    7.81:1

By contrast, the after-inflation dollar median household income numbers (which measure what’s earned each year versus what’s owned in toto) show pre-virus backsliding under Trump. (Here I’m using Labor Department figures as presented by the Economic Policy Institute — definitely a part of “MAGA World” — because they take into account some recent methodological changes made by the Labor Department.)  

                              non-hispanic white     non-hispanic black     white-to-black

2009:                             67,352                         40,231                      1.67:1

2016:                             69,292                         42,684                      1.62:1

2019:                             76,057                         46,073                      1.65:1

Biden has four years to show his racial economic justice stuff, and all Americans should hope that he makes further progress. But where Jan (and so many others) seem to be expecting a major improvement over his predecessors’ record, it seems just as legitimate to wonder if he’ll wind up matching it – even after the results for CCP Virus-ridden 2020 are in.

Im-Politic: Final Grades on the Final Debate

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battleground states, climate change, crime, crime bills, election 2020, energy, fossil fuels, fracking, green energy, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, marijuana, narcotics, natural gas, oil, presidential debates, progressives, racism, systemic racism, Trump

I got something massively wrong about the second (and final) presidential debate of 2020. I thought that my frantic live-tweeting covered every important aspect of the Thursday night event. Upon reading the transcript, I realized there was lots more to say.

Let’s start with the 30,000-foot picture. There’s no question that President Trump performed more effectively than in the first debate. Even his most uncritical admirers, like Fox News talker Sean Hannity, have conceded as much (Check out the video of his post-debate show, in which he acknowledges that long-time Republican political operative Ari Fleischer was right in faulting Mr. Trump’s first debate performance as too overheated.)

But there are plenty of questions left unanswered about the second debate’s impact on the Presidential race. For the record, I’m sticking with the assessment I offered after the first debate: Given his lead even in most battleground state polls, because the Trump campaign and other Trumpers (including Hannity) had set the bar so low for “Sleepy Joe,” all Biden needed to do was show up and not screw up massively in order to win.

Those battleground polls have tightened somewhat, Biden’s perfectly fine first debate performance raised the bar for the second debate, and I’m far from thinking that the race is over. But I’d still rather be in Biden’s shoes than in Mr. Trump’s. And time keeps running out for the President. All the same, it’s important to remember that we haven’t seen any major post-debate nationwide or battleground polls come out yet, so there’s simply no hard evidence to go on at this point.

The time-is-not-the-President’s-friend point, though, brings up my first new debate-related point: Mr. Trump’s improved performance alone (whether he “won” or not either on points or according to the public), indicates that he erred in rejecting the Commission on Presidential Debate’s offer to hold the second debate virtually, due ostensibly to CCP Virus-related reasons.

Especially if Mr. Trump had by that time begun heeding the advice of supporters urging him to dial it down (which isn’t at all clear), he lost an opportunity to square off again against Biden in real time. And although there’s no adequate on-line substitute for the atmosphere and resulting pressures of in-person encounters, the President did lose a valuable opportunity to reassure voters unnerved – rightly or wrongly – by his first debate tactics.

Getting down to specific points, on Thursday night, two issues really do demand further discussion. First, I might have been mistaken in my tweeted view that the Biden comments on natural gas fracking and energy (and related climate change) policy wouldn’t be terribly important.

I did agree that the former Vice President did nothing to help himself in key energy states like Pennsylvania, where voters might worry that his various positions – and the prominence of staunch fossil fuels opponents in Democratic ranks now – would guarantee relatively rapid closures of the coal mines and gas and oil fields that created so much employment in their regions. But I stated that, because these subjects had been aired so thoroughly already, few energy voters’ minds would be changed.

What I clearly underestimated was the impact of an extended discussion of energy and climate subjects before a nation-wide audience. If I’d been right, why would the Trump campaign have almost immediately put out an ad spotlighting Biden’s assorted statements on these topics. And why would the Biden campaign have spent so much time trying to explain the Biden position?

Looking at the transcript helped me understand why energy- and climate-related anxieties in the energy states might have been elevated by the Biden debate remarks. For on the one hand, the Democratic challenger insisted that he was “ruling out” “banning fracking” and claimed that

“What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that and we can do that by investing money in doing it, but it’s a transition to that.”

And whereas previously, Biden had responded to a primary debate question about whether fossil fuels would have any place in his prospective administration by declaring “We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those. Any fossil fuel,” on Thursday night, the former Vice President referred to transitioning from “the old oil industry”–presumably to some (undefined) new kind of oil industry.

Nonetheless, it would be reasonable for energy states residents to question these assurances of gradualness and transformation instead of elimination given Biden’s continued contention that “global warming is an existential threat to humanity,” that “we’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to ten years,” and that the energy sector in toto needs “to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025.” Last time I checked, that’s only five years from now.

Moreover, given the notable split within the Democratic party on climate change and energy issues between progressives and centrists, the Biden statements suggesting that major fossil fuel industries will survive during his administration in some form could depress turnout in their ranks for a candidate who clearly needs to stoke their enthusiasm.

The second set of issues I should have tweeted more about entails crime and race relations. I think Biden deserves a great deal of credit for calling “a mistake” his support for crime bills of the 1980s and 1990s that, in the words of moderator Kristen Welker “contributed to the incarceration of tens of thousands of young Black men who had small amounts of drugs in their possession, they are sons, they are brothers, they are fathers, they are uncles, whose families are still to this day, some of them suffering the consequences.”

He was also correct in pointing out that President Trump – who quite properly pointed to some noteworthy achievements of his administration on behalf of African Americans – took a sweepingly harsh line on crime himself in previous decades.

But two positions taken by Biden should disturb even supporters. First, his argument that “It took too long [during the Obama administration] to get it right. Took too long to get it right. I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States,” clearly throws his former boss under the bus. In fact, he also implicitly blamed Obama for the failure to resolve the problem created by children living the United States born to illegal immigrant parents.

The second such position was Biden’s argument that “No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. They should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail.”

I personally can support this view when it comes to hard drugs. But marijuana? For whose use so many American blacks have been jailed – and so many more than white Americans? (I’m not a big fan of the American Civil Liberties Union these days, but the data in this study are tough to refute.) Mandatory (government-funded?) therapy for potheads? That could use some rethinking.

But like I said at the outset, I expressed views on many other debate-related subjects on my Twitter feed (@AlanTonelson). So there’s no substitute for following there, as well as checking in with RealityChek, for the most up-to-date thinking on the election — as well as everything else under the sun.

Im-Politic: VP Debate Questions That Should be Asked

Tags

1619 Project, African Americans, Barack Obama, Biden, budget deficits, CCP Virus, censorship, China, Confederate monuments, Constitution, coronavirus, COVID 19, education, election 2020, Electoral College, filibuster, Founding Fathers, free speech, healthcare, history, history wars, Im-Politic, inequality, investment, Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, national security, Obamacare, police killings, propaganda, protests, racism, riots, semiconductors, slavery, spending, Supreme Court, systemic racism, Taiwan, tariffs, tax cuts, taxes, Trade, trade war, Trump, Vice Presidential debate, Wuhan virus

Since I don’t want to set a record for longest RealityChek post ever, I’ll do my best to limit this list of questions I’d like to see asked at tonight’s Vice Presidential debate to some subjects that I believe deserve the very highest priority, and/or that have been thoroughly neglected so far during this campaign.

>For Vice President Mike Pence: If for whatever reason, President Trump couldn’t keep the CCP Virus under control within his own White House, why should Americans have any faith that any of his policies will bring it under control in the nation as a whole?

>For Democratic candidate Senator Kamala Harris: What exactly should be the near-term goal of U.S. virus policy? Eliminate it almost completely (as was done with polio)? Stop its spread? Slow its spread? Reduce deaths? Reduce hospitalizations? And for goals short of complete elimination, define “slow” and “reduce” in terms of numerical targets.

>For Pence: Given that the administration’s tax cuts and spending levels were greatly ballooning the federal budget deficit even before the virus struck, isn’t it ridiculous for Congressional Republicans to insist that total spending in the stimulus package remain below certain levels?

For Harris: Last month, the bipartisan Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus unveiled a compromise stimulus framework. President Trump has spoken favorably about it, while stopping short of a full endorsement. Does Vice President Biden endorse it? If so, has he asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sign on? If he doesn’t endorse it, why not?

For Pence: The nation is in the middle of a major pandemic. Whatever faults the administration sees in Obamacare, is this really the time to be asking the Supreme Court to rule it un-Constitutional, and throw the entire national health care system into mass confusion?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration offer free taxpayer-financed healthcare to illegal aliens? Wouldn’t this move strongly encourage unmanageable numbers of migrants to swamp U.S. borders?

For Pence: President Trump has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese exports headed to U.S. markets. But U.S. investors – including government workers’ pension funds – still keep sending equally large sums into Chinese government coffers. When is the Trump administration finally going to plug this enormous hole?

For Harris: Will a Biden administration lift or reduce any of the Trump China or metals tariffs. Will it do so unconditionally? If not, what will it be seeking in return?

For both: Taiwan now manufactures the world’s most advanced semiconductors, and seems sure to maintain the lead for the foreseeable future. Does the United States now need to promise to protect Taiwan militarily in order to keep this vital defense and economic knowhow out of China’s hands?

For Pence: Since the administration has complained so loudly about activist judges over-ruling elected legislators and making laws themselves, will Mr. Trump support checking this power by proposing term limits or mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices? If not, why not?

For Harris: Don’t voters deserve to know the Biden Supreme Court-packing position before Election Day? Ditto for his position on abolishing the filibuster in the Senate.

>For Pence: The Electoral College seems to violate the maxim that each votes should count equally. Does the Trump administration favor reform? If not, why not?

>For Harris: Many Democrats argue that the Electoral College gives lightly populated, conservative and Republican-leaning states outsized political power. But why, then, was Barack Obama able to win the White House not once but twice?

>For Pence: Charges that America’s police are killing unarmed African Americans at the drop of a hat are clearly wild exaggerations. But don’t you agree that police stop African-American pedestrians and drivers much more often than whites without probable cause – a problem that has victimized even South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott?

For Harris: Will Biden insist that mayors and governors in cities and states like Oregon and Washington, which have been victimized by chronic antifa violence, investigate, arrest and prosecute its members and leaders immediately? And if they don’t, will he either withhold federal law enforcement aid, or launch such investigations at the federal level?

For Pence: Why should any public places in America honor Confederate figures – who were traitors to the United States? Can’t we easily avoid the “erasing history” danger by putting these monuments in museums with appropriate background material?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration support even peacefully removing from public places statues and monuments to historic figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because their backgrounds included slave-holding?

For both: Shouldn’t voters know much more about the Durham Justice Department investigation of official surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2015 and 2016 before Election Day?

For both: Should the Big Tech companies be broken up on antitrust grounds?

For both: Should internet and social media platforms be permitted to censor any form of Constitutionally permitted speech?

For Pence: Doesn’t the current system of using property taxes to fund most primary and secondary public education guarantee that low-income school children will lack adequate resources?

For Harris: Aren’t such low-income students often held back educationally by non-economic factors like generations of broken families and counter-productive student behavior, as well as by inadequate school funding – as leading figures like Jesse Jackson (at least for one period) and former President Obama have claimed?

For Pence: What’s the difference between the kind of “patriotic education” the President says he supports and official propaganda?

For Harris: Would a Biden administration oppose local school districts using propagandistic material like The New York Times‘ U.S. history-focused 1619 Project for their curricula? Should federal aid to districts that keep using such materials be cut off or reduced?

Now it’s your turn, RealityChek readers! What questions would you add? And which of mine would you deep six?

Im-Politic: A Chinese Link to Black Lives Matter?

Tags

Alicia Garza, Black Futures Lab, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter Too, BLM, China, Chinese Progressive Association, election interference, Heritage Foundation, Im-Politic, race relations, racism, reparations, structural racism, systemic racism, The Federalist, wealth gap, white fragility

Our times are so racially fraught that even I (someone who rarely feels defensive about my views) feel the need to start out this post by specifying that I am not a systemic or structural racist or even an unwitting example of white fragility. Indeed, I’m so woke on the issue of continuing racial discrimination in America that I’ve come out for reparations to remedy what I see as one recent example of open-and-shut racial injustice whose victims would be relatively easy to identify and compensate. And I’ve called attention to the still yawning racial wealth gap. 

I don’t even have significant problems with the phrase “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) – although I like “Black Lives Matter, Too” because it avoids the possibility of either-or interpretations while making clear that there’s a still a racial gap that must be eliminated.

But the various organizations and coalitions invoking this phrase that have sprung up lately? I’m not so sure about many of them, especially since their proclaimed agendas often go far beyond securing racial justice. (See, e.g., here.) And just yesterday I found out about another potential problem with these groups that seems to support a point I made in a recent article about the massive and under-reported scale of Chinese interference in American public life – signs of close connections between a key BLM organization the Chinese government.

As reported in The Federalist, a conservative publication, based on research by the equally conservative Heritage Foundation, an outfit called Black Futures Lab (BFL) is funded mainly by an organization called the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). The Lab’s own website, moreover, confirms this finding.

It’s true that BFL is only one group in the BLM constellation. But it’s no ordinary group. Its “Principal” is Alicia Garza, who describes herself, and is credited in news reports, as a founder of the BLM movement.

It’s also true that the CPA isn’t officially affiliated with the Chinese government. But Beijing is certainly a fan of what’s been described as its Boston chapter, as this article (cited in the Heritage Foundation report) from its official mouthpiece demonstrates. One charge I could not independently corroborate – the claim that the Chinese flag-raising event the article mentions was “hosted by the Consulate General of China in New York.”

Consulate officials clearly attended the other event – a flag-raiser – and spoke. But unike the aforementioned Boston passport-focused event, I was unable to find evidence that they played any organizing role.

So maybe the cooperation doesn’t go any further than attending (and sometimes organizing) the kinds of celebrations that might simply be ethnic solidarity events. But according to this study (an undergraduate thesis, but one from Stanford University by a student with clearly progressive sympathies), the admiration between CPA and the Chinese government is decidedly mutual:

“The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China [PRC] organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people’.

Further, although “Its activities were independent of the Communist Party of China or the US,” it “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the US and San Francisco Bay Area.”

Again, the prospect can’t be ruled out that Beijing is content simply to admire CPA’s efforts to improve social services for Chinese Americans or even help organize Chinese American events with the group. But given the influence I thoroughly documented in the aforementioned magazine article that China has gained over major American institutions; and given the unusual interest displayed by a group like CPA, which is exclusively focused on Chinese Americans (as it makes clear) in an organization that says it’s exclusively focused on African Americans (especially since serious problem of poverty and discrimination still clearly dog Chinese Americans, according to CPA), grounds for further investigation don’t exactly seem to be lacking.

Indeed, as known by anyone with legal or law enforcement experience, or most fans of detective stories, showing that defendants have had “motive, opportunity and means” is a venerable framework for investigating and determining wrongdoing. When it comes to fomenting racial tensions in the United States, the Chinese government surely has all three. So let’s hope that the federal government (both the Exective and Congress), as well as the supposed watchdogs of our democracy, the news media, look into China’s involvement with the Black Lives Matter movement as aggressively as it’s looked into other charges of improper foreign interference in America’s politics.

Im-Politic: About That Systemic Police Racism Charge

Tags

African Americans, Gallup, Im-Politic, Pew Research Center, police, polls, race relations, racism, systemic racism

For the longest time, it’s been widely noted that polls tend to send two unusually strange and related messages: First, Americans’ views of their own personal situations, and of the national situation, often differ tremendously; and second, the first is much brighter than the second.

So for instance, poll respondents can dismiss Congress as a bunch of incompetent crooks, yet voters keep reelecting their own representatives – in the most important poll of all. They can condemn America’s healthcare system as a mess, but make clear how much they like their own coverage.

But familiar as I am with this pattern, I was stunned to see it appear in a Thursday Gallup poll about African Americans and their encounters with the police.

Taken on their own, the findings seemed narrative-busting enough. The Gallup headline was pretty par for the recent course: “For Black Americans, 41% of Police Encounters Not Positive.” That’s hardly confirmation of the apparently emerging conventional wisdom that American law enforcement is plagued by systemic racism.

After all, even the downbeat wording of the header suggests that 59 percent of these encounters have been positive for African Americans. The actual results are even more surprising, given how systemic the systemic charge has become. Specifically, 73 percent of African Americans polled reported that during their “interactions with police,” they were “treated with respect.” And 74 percent said they were “treated fairly.”

To be sure, these percentages are lower than for whites (by 20 percentage points for the overall positive/non-positive assessment, by 17 percentage points when it comes to respect, and by 19 percentage points when it comes to fairness). But although these gaps are hardly trivial, all the readings are well into majority positivity, respect, and fairness territories. And even the finding that provides the most support for the systemic racism charge is kind of suspect when you think about it. After all, let’s say that any driver is stopped by a police car and (justly) ticketed for speeding. Whatever his or her race, what driver is likely to feel great about the experience?

And these findings also fit the broader polling pattern of individuals assessing their own personal situations as being better than relevant broader situations. For example, in early 2019 (i.e., not so long ago), Gallup  reported that 77 percent of African Americans reported believing that “blacks in their community” are “treated less fairly than whites” in “dealing with the police, such as traffic incidents.” FYI, the questions were asked in 2018.

Moreover, not only does that finding clash pretty loudly with the results from this past Thursday about African Americans’ own personal experiences. It also clashes pretty loudly with the results from that same 2019 poll’s findings on African Americans’ own personal experiences. When asked “Can you think of any occasion in the last 30 days when you felt you were treated unfairly in the following places because you were black?”, only 21 percent of blacks answered “Yes.” Maybe the limited timeframe held down the “yes” responses for individuals. But if police racism really is systemic, you’d think that for the African American respondents as a whole, the time interval problem would fade away.

And here’s an interesting kicker: The 21 percent figure isn’t the all-time high recorded by Gallup. That came in 2004 – during George W. Bush’s Presidency.

Nor is Gallup the only polling organization to report a large gap between African Americans’ views on police racism generally, and on their own experiences with police. An April, 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 84 percent of African Americans believe that “in general in our country these days, blacks are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with police.” But only 44 percent said they had been unfairly stopped by police.

None of this is to say that there are no racial issues in American law enforcement. After all, that 44 percent Pew figure doesn’t translate into “most,” but it’s still disturbingly high. My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.

But recognizing the importance of these instances is a far cry from proving that  American law enforcement as a whole is afflicted with systemic racism, however you define the term. And the Gallup and Pew results represent two more reasons for caution about this conclusion.