The unrest emanating from Ferguson, Missouri following a grand jury’s decision to forgo indictments of the police officer who shot Michael Brown is the latest expression of a chronic and deep-seated anger at institutional racism in American life, particularly within the criminal justice system. The troubling asymmetries of American justice can be compressed into the names of a series of infamous cases, from the police beating of Rodney King, and the wrongful convictions in the Central Park jogger rape case, to the “stand your ground” defence used in the Trayvon Martin trial. These, and hundreds of other cases that could be cited in their place, underscore the fact that black Americans routinely face violence at the hands of US law enforcement, and despite repeated ‘conversations’ on race, America has made precious little progress on this issue.
Police violence against black citizens has become depressingly commonplace in American life. In July, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old resident of Staten Island, died after police officers placed him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him after he had broken up a fight. The asthmatic Garner complained repeatedly that he could not breathe during the police takedown, but the officers let more than seven minutes pass before they attempted to resuscitate him. In September, Utah police officers fatally shot 22-year-old Darrien Hunt, after someone filed a complaint of a suspicious person walking with what appeared to be a weapon. In fact, Hunt was wearing an artificial sword as part of a Japanese anime costume. Video of Hunt fleeing police appears to contradict official statements that he was shot after threatening police officers. Just a few days ago Cleveland police fatally shot a 12-year-old at a playground after he responded to police officers with drawn guns by reaching for a toy gun in his waistband.
African Americans make up around 12 per cent of the US population, but account for more than a quarter of all arrests, and 40 per cent of the prison population. They are also killed far more often during arrests than any other ethnic group. A recent Pew poll found that black Americans are twice as likely to feel unfairly treated by police in their communities and US Bureau of Justice statistics indicate that blacks and Latinos are three times as likely as white Americans to be searched after a traffic stop.
Data from the US Sentencing Commission shows that within the federal justice system, black prisoners typically receive sentences that are 20 per cent longer than those given to white offenders convicted of the same crime.
The gulf between black and white attitudes to police violence was strikingly evident in a recent survey of St Louis County residents, carried out a month after Michael Brown’s shooting. When asked whether the shooting was justified, 62 per cent of whites said yes; 65 per cent of black respondents, no. Asked whether Brown had been targeted because he was black, 77 per cent of whites said no; 64 per cent of blacks, yes. A raft of other findings confirm the fact that many African American communities remain dangerously isolated and marginalized 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. More than 20 years ago, for instance, the economist Amartya Sen showed that if one used mortality statistics to measure social vulnerability – rather than traditional measures of poverty, which overemphasize personal income – black residents of Harlem were much less likely to reach the age of 65 than people living in Bangladesh. Similar levels of socio-economic alienation were revealed in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, but little has been done to alleviate these problems.
In addition to these problems, within the US there appears to be a systemic bias against prosecuting police officers. In Dallas, for example, between 2008 and 2012, grand juries reviewing 81 police shootings returned just a single indictment. In Missouri, despite the public fatalism which preceded the grand jury’s decision to clear officer Darren Wilson of any wrongdoing, several informed commentators believed that an indictment would be issued.
Generally, a refusal to indict is unusually rare. Four years ago, according to the US Bureau of Justice only 11 of 162,000 federal cases prosecuted by US attorneys failed to return an indictment. In this case, however, public pessimism turned out to be well founded, and further confirmation of the system’s reluctance to hold policemen accountable for violence against black citizens.
While these shortcomings present the United States in a particularly unflattering light, few developed democracies can claim to be free from similar problems. In Canada, for instance, the Aboriginal population makes up only four per cent of the population, but nearly a quarter of the federal prison population. Canada’s other indicators for socioeconomic exclusion are similarly damning. Seven years ago data from the UK Ministry of Justice showed that black citizens were nearly seven times more likely to be stopped and searched by British police, and the incarceration rate for black citizens (as a proportion of the total population) was 7.3 in 1,000 compared to 1.3 per 1,000 for whites, and 1.7 per 1,000 for Asians.
Michael Brown’s killing and the regular police mistreatment of black Americans is a painful reminder of how difficult it has been for the United States to overcome the ‘original sin’ of slavery, and to reform its entrenched institutional racism. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of all the recent upheaval is that it has taken place while America’s first African-American president was in office and yet President Obama, despite his best intentions, seems all but powerless to change the status quo.
