Policing the Black man Arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment

Review by Choice Review

Policing and race in the criminal justice system are important areas of research, discussion, and debate in schools across the US. Davis addresses these issues with this edited volume, which features the nation's foremost scholars of policing, race, and the US criminal justice system. Esteemed scholars such as Katheryn Russell-Brown, Marc Mauer, Jeremy Travis, and Bruce Western join Davis in presenting the extent of knowledge as to how race in the US relates to police, prosecution, and judicial decision-making. This book specifically discusses racial profiling, implicit bias, police accountability, prosecutorial discretion, and poverty. The contributing authors examine the experiences of black men at every stage of the criminal justice system. The book is extremely well written and could easily be used as a resource for research or as assigned reading for a graduate seminar. Each chapter contains a full bibliography and a listing of notes for further details on claims and statements made throughout the text. A valued addition to any university library collection, especially if schools have a criminal justice or criminology program. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Daniel Ryan Kavish, Lander University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

BLACK PEOPLE HAVE NEVER been truly safe in America. Police brutality and the use of excessive force have been enduring features of our history. Today social media has allowed us to make our collective vulnerability newly visible to the general public. Not since the civil rights era, when images of police officers beating peaceful protesters made the nightly news, have we engaged in this level of national conversation about racial inequality. With formal segregation behind us, the racism that pervades our society has pooled in the criminal justice and law enforcement strategies that developed in the wake of Jim Crow. We police black and brown citizens and lock them in cages like no other country in the world. Three new books lay out an alternative path. In "Called to Rise," by the former Dallas police chief David O. Brown, we learn how a black law enforcement officer ascended the ranks and reformed the department, helping to make the entire city safer. "Policing the Black Man," edited by the activist and law professor Angela J. Davis, brings together 11 essays from scholars and criminal justice practitioners who offer forward-thinking policy suggestions. And in the most readable and provocative account of the consequences of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," the law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler argues that our society must be completely remade in "Chokehold: Policing Black Men." Brown, who is best known for his handling of the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers by a sniper in July 2016, believes "we will make progress only when we set aside our assumptions and really start listening to each other." He admits he didn't always think this way. When Brown was a patrol officer in the 1980s, he ascribed to the dominant approach: "Put the criminals in jail, and let God sort them out." In the 1990s, the Dallas police chief at the time assigned Brown to a community policing program. Brown had been "a cop who gloried in locking away villains," but his "instincts had slowly shifted," and he began to see the value in having police officers "connect with the people they served." In 2010, Brown became police chief, and he had his officers go door-to-door to meet the people they were charged with protecting, attending homeowners association meetings and block parties, hosting basketball games and offering counseling sessions at local schools. (He also lost his 27year-old son that year, to police gunfire. His son, who had bipolar disorder, was killed after fatally shooting a bystander and a police officer.) Brown's approach, based not on arrest numbers but on policecommunity engagement, led to a historic decline in Dallas's crime rate between 2010 and 2015. Brown retired in 2016, after he noticed an uptick in the crime rate, which he attributes to budget cuts that led to staffing shortages. Although Brown offers us one of the most impressive models for community policing, his view begins to look idealized in light of the racist practices described by Paul Butler in "Chokehold." "Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do," Butler writes. "The police, as policy, treat African-Americans with contempt." Like Brown, Butler admits that he was once an active participant in this system, a prosecutor who "sent a lot of black men to prison" and "defended cops who had racially profiled or used excessive force." While Butler urges us to rethink the purpose and function of policing entirely, a number of the essays in Angela J. Davis's anthology suggest that the historical tension between low-income residents of color and the police charged with protecting them can be addressed with training programs. In one of the most popular of these programs, known as procedural justice, policemen are taught that if they treat people with dignity, respect and fairness, they will build trust and gain legitimacy. Meanwhile, implicit bias training encourages officers to recognize the set of racial assumptions they carry but do not consciously control. These measures can also save lives. As Yale Law School's Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler put it in their essay, the more trust communities have in the police, the more likely they are to report crime, provide testimony and help "to hold offenders accountable." Barring fundamental legal reforms, however, these programs can have only a limited impact. Indeed, much of the discussion in "Chokehold" and "Policing the Black Man" highlights the impact of major Supreme Court decisions of the last 50 years, including ones that supported racial profiling and deemed statistical evidence of racial disparities insufficient to prove a "discriminatory purpose" on the part of police officers or the courts. As Jin ??? Lee and Sherrilyn A. Ifill, both from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, point out in their contribution to Davis's book, "the courts function in a distorted reality that only recognizes racial discrimination in a specific and distinct form: overt racial animus by a specific actor." The Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution has largely failed to extend African-American citizens protection from police abuse and sentencing disparities. Lee and Ifill suggest that hope might lie in pursuing "a more effective body of equal protection and anti-discrimination law." Butler, however, remains skeptical of incrementalist measures. "Liberal reforms, such as anti-discrimination laws, have not brought long-term change," Butler writes in "Chokehold." "Civil Rights laws have helped stigmatize discrimination but have barely blunted its effect." He demonstrates that when citizenship rights are extended to African-Americans, policy makers and officials at all levels of government historically used law and incarceration as proxy to exert social control in black communities. Black Codes, convict leasing and Jim Crow segregation followed Emancipation; overpolicing and mass incarceration followed the civil rights movement. "In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform - we must think of transformation," Butler writes. "The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew." For Butler, remaking America entails abolishing both prisons and the conditions of segregated poverty that increase the likelihood of criminal justice supervision. Butler cites a study from New York University's Brennan Center for Justice estimating that 40 percent of the nation's prisoners could be released without compromising public safety. This alone would save taxpayers $200 billion over 20 years, freeing up new opportunities for resources and outcomes. He suggests those funds could be used to hire 327,000 new public-school teachers, or to create jobs for low-income citizens who often have no options for survival outside of the informal economy. And since nearly 80 percent of people in prison suffer from drug addiction or mental health issues, Butler thinks it wise to reallocate funding from police departments and correctional authorities to community health care. If the prospect of this level of structural change sounds impossible or rash, at the very least we can heed the insights the public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson provides in "Policing the Black Man." Stevenson looks to South Africa, where a series of truth and reconciliation hearings followed the end of apartheid, and Germany, where citizens are encouraged to visit the sites of Nazi concentration camps and reflect on the history of the Holocaust, as examples of the kind of historical reckoning we must also commit to as a nation. For it is only by fully confronting the traumatic and contradictory currents of American history that we can begin to change course. Past abuses must be repaired so that safety and justice can exist for us all.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"The political justice system polices black men at every step of the process," asserts Davis (Arbitrary Justice), a professor of law at American University and editor of this eye-opening assemblage of essays on racism in the American criminal justice system. The various perspectives of the contributors-all specialists in criminal law and justice-offer a kaleidoscopic view of each step. In "Boys to Men," for example, Kristin Henning, the director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown Law, demonstrates the devastating impact of the presence of police security officers in schools. Her essay is followed by law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown's in-depth examination of implicit bias. "The Grand Jury and Police Violence Against Black Men," by Roger Fairfax (Grand Jury 2.0), illuminates a less-discussed stage of the criminal process, as does Davis's own contribution, which considers the particular role of the prosecutor. The culmination is relentlessly informative and disturbing. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In the introduction to these new essays, Davis (law, American Univ.; Arbitrary Justice) states that the media has made the American public real-time witnesses to the country's chronic and systemic violence against black males. Davis, along with 13 other criminal justice experts, advance critical understanding to combat and correct structural racism and advocate for justice and peace. They suggest that, although the evidence is now readily available, targeted brutality is hardly new as it perpetuates what black people have endured and continue to live with following the legacy of slavery and the racialized criminal justice system. Policing propagates that legacy through policies and practices of racial profiling. Further, implicit bias from chronic presumption of guilt reaches beyond policing to disparate prosecuting of black males, as several contributors demonstrate. The essayists offer more than indictments, however. Almost all move beyond calls for reform to respond with practical suggestions for change to make black lives truly matter. VERDICT For general readers, students, and experts alike, these essays provide much-needed data, analysis, and insights into the disparities throughout U.S. society and its criminal justice system. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.] -Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Lucid perspectives on how and why the United States criminal justice system often victimizes black males.A professor at American University's Washington College of Law, Davis (Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor, 2007, etc.) used her platform to pull together this collection of essays from a variety of scholars and writers. Providing useful context, the editor points out that black males have never fared well when confronted by police and prosecutors across the U.S. For a couple of centuries, in fact, black men could rarely convince white authorities of the breadth and depth of the injustices. In recent decades, new technology, including smartphones and body cameras, combined with the sounding board of social media have removed doubt about the credibility of many victims. In the introduction, Davis invokes the names of numerous dead black males, placing special emphasis on the killing of Trayvon Martin five years ago by George Zimmerman. While soliciting the essays, Davis offered an expanded definition of the word "policing," showing how much of the foundation of policing black males rests on racial profiling by law enforcement. In her powerful essay, law professor Rene McDonald Hutchins explains what the law does and does not say about racial profiling, how police agency policies are drafted in light of the law, and how the on-the-street practices of racial profiling sometimes violate both the letter and spirit of laws and policies. While many of the essays focus on the police, Davis focuses on her specialty, prosecutors, and how their untrammeled authority is a major part of the problems within the criminal justice system. While the essays lean toward narrating the problems rather than proposing comprehensive solutions, the final essay links multigenerational poverty of black males with violence and an absurd level of incarceration. Other contributors include Bryan Stevenson, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Marc Mauer. An absorbing anthology, scholarly yet approachable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Introduction ANGELA J. DAVIS   Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Fred­die Gray, Sam DuBose, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Terence Crutcher are just some of the names on a long list of unarmed black boys and men who were killed by police officers in recent years. Although black men have been the victims of violence at the hands of the state since the time of slavery, tech­nology and social media now permit us to literally bear witness to many of these killings, repeatedly. Millions of people have watched the video of a police officer choking Eric Garner to death as he struggled for air. Similarly, millions have watched the video of a police officer shooting Walter Scott in the back as he ran for his life. Who can ever forget the grainy footage of Tamir Rice--the twelve-year-old boy who was shot by a police officer while he played alone with a toy gun in a park near his home? Two videos--one from a police helicopter and another from a police dashboard camera--show Terence Crutcher walk­ing away from police officers with his hands raised high in the air just before he was shot and killed. These images have evoked feelings of fear, sadness, and outrage and serve as a reminder that the lives of black men and boys continue to be devalued and destroyed with impunity at the hands of the state. To date, not one of the police officers who killed these men and boys has been convicted of a single crime.   From the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown in 1619 to the lynchings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present day--black boys and men have been unlawfully killed by those who were sworn to uphold the law and by vigilantes who took the law into their own hands. The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened its doors on September 24, 2016, includes exhibits that tell the story of many of these killings. Yet these killings are not just a part of African American history. They have continued well into the twenty-first century--almost four hundred years after the beginning of slavery--and persist with remarkable fre­quency and brutality during a time when America elected its first African American president.   Many of these race-based killings have inspired and reinvig­orated movements for change. The brutal killing of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963, and the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 all serve as markers on the civil rights movement timeline, as did so many other killings of black men by white racists. Each tragic killing sparked nationwide protests and renewed activism in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice in the United States.   The killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 was a pivotal marker of racial violence against black men in the twenty-first century. Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a white man who called the police when he saw Martin walking in his neighborhood. Zimmerman, a member of a neighborhood crime watch group, reported to the police that Martin looked "suspicious" and that he looked like he was "up to no good or on drugs or something." Ignoring the dispatcher's warning that he should not follow Martin, Zimmerman ultimately shot and killed him. Martin was unarmed and was on his way back to his father's house after buying snacks at a local convenience store. Initially Zimmerman was not even charged with a crime, but after nationwide protests, he was charged with Martin's murder. A jury ultimately acquitted him.   The killing of Trayvon Martin, the initial failure of the pros­ecutor to charge Zimmerman with a crime, and Zimmerman's ultimate acquittal captured the attention of the nation. Presi­dent Obama even weighed in, stating, "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." Martin's killing also inspired the phrase "Black Lives Matter." The phrase trended on Twitter and all forms of social media and was displayed on posters carried in protests after Martin's killing and after every killing of a black man or woman by a police officer from that day forward. Black Lives Matter ultimately became a social justice movement with chapters throughout the United States and Canada.   Many unarmed black men and boys have been killed since Trayvon Martin's tragic death five years ago. Many of the kill­ings occurred after police officers arguably engaged in racial profiling--stopping and harassing these men for no explainable reason other than the color of their skin. In all of the cases where black men were shot and killed, the officers claimed that they felt threatened, even though the men were unarmed and often running away or retreating. In almost all of the cases, the police officers were never arrested or charged with a crime.   The tragic killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and others served as the catalyst for this anthology. But these killings also inspired the contributing authors to think about all of the ways that black men are "policed"--in the broad sense of the word--heavily and harshly at every step of the criminal process. In fact, black men are policed and treated worse than their similarly situated white counterparts at every step of the criminal justice system, from arrest through sentencing. These unwarranted disparities exist whether black men are charged with crimes or are victims of crimes. Police officers stop, search, and arrest black men far more frequently than white men engaged in the same behavior. Prosecutors charge black men more frequently and with more serious crimes than white men who engage in the same behavior. And there are disproportionate numbers of black men in the nation's prisons and jails. Criminal defendants, regardless of their race, are punished less harshly when their vic­tims are black men. This anthology explores and explains the "policing" of black men--from slavery to the present day and at every stage of the criminal process and beyond.   Why Black Men? Black men are not the only people of color to be treated worse than their similarly situated white counterparts at every step of the criminal process. Black women, Latino/a men and women, Native Americans, and other people of color also experience vio­lence at the hands of the state and discriminatory treatment in the criminal justice system, as do people who are gay, lesbian, and/or transgender. This book's focus on black men in no way trivializes the experiences of all people who face these harms.   While acknowledging that other groups have been and con­tinue to be oppressed and discriminated against, this book focuses on black men. In many ways, the experience of black men in the criminal justice system is unique. The most noticeable difference is that they are impacted more adversely than any other demo­graphic in the United States--at every stage of the process.   Black Boys Are Disproportionately Arrested and Detained Black boys are more likely to be referred to the juvenile jus­tice system than any other children. In 2011, black boys rep­resented the greatest percentage of children placed in juvenile detention--903 black boys per 100,000 were sent to detention as compared to 125 black girls. A Rhode Island study found that black boys were 9.3 times more likely to spend time in juvenile detention than white boys.   Over half the students arrested at school in the United States and referred to the juvenile justice system are black or His­panic. While black students represent only 16 percent of stu­dent enrollment, they represent 27 percent of students referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of students subjected to in-school arrests. Black male students alone make up 18 percent of all referrals and arrests.   Black Men Are Disproportionately Arrested African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than whites and 49 percent of black men can expect to be arrested at least once by age twenty-three compared to 44 percent of His­panic men and 38 percent of white men. Police officers are permitted to stop and frisk individuals if they have "reasonable suspicion" that crime is afoot and that the person is armed and dangerous. However, numerous studies have shown that the practice of racial profiling has resulted in black men being tar­geted and disproportionately stopped, frisked, and arrested.   For example, the New York Civil Liberties Union analyzed the New York Police Department's 2011 stop-and-frisk database and found that 41.6 percent of all stops were of black and Latino men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, even though they make up only 4.7 percent of the population of New York. The same study found that no crime had been committed in 90 percent of the stops. Black men were disproportionately stopped. The number of stops of black men exceeded the city's entire population of black men by 9,720.   Black Men Are More Likely to Be Killed or Injured During a Police Encounter While more whites are killed by law enforcement than people of color, African Americans are killed at a disproportionate rate. In fact, black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. Between 2010 and 2012, black boys ages fif­teen through nineteen were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million compared to 1.47 per million for white boys of the same age group. In addition, a significant number of black men killed by police were unarmed. Data collected from January 1, 2015, to May 31, 2015, revealed that African Americans killed by the police were twice as likely to be unarmed as whites.17 An over­whelming 95 percent of these victims were men.   Not all violent encounters with the police result in death, but black men fare worse in nonfatal encounters as well. A study conducted by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statis­tics (BJS) examined police use of nonfatal force between 2002 and 2011. The study found that African Americans were more likely to experience nonfatal force at the hands of police officers than either Hispanics or whites.   Black Men Are Disproportionately Imprisoned and Receive Longer Sentences African Americans make up approximately 35 percent of the prison population in the United States, and by the end of 2015, black men constituted 34 percent of the American prison popula­tion. In 2015, 5,165 in 100,000 black men ages twenty-five to twenty-nine were imprisoned compared to 2,165 Hispanic men and 921 white men of the same ages. Remarkably, the number of black men in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole by the end of 2009 roughly equaled the number enslaved in 1850. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcer­ated in his lifetime.   Black men serve more time for their crimes than others simi­larly situated. Data collected by the U.S. Sentencing Commis­sion between December 2007 and 2011 revealed that black men in federal prisons received sentences 19.5 percent longer than white men sentenced for the same crime. Blacks are also dis­proportionately sentenced to death. As of 2014, the national death row population is approximately 42 percent black, while the overall black population is only 13.6 percent. ###   For all of these reasons, this anthology focuses on the plight of black men and boys. The extraordinarily disproportionate mis­treatment of black boys and men at every step of the criminal process is explored in depth. As the essays make clear, the issues and problems are complex, as are the solutions. The authors are scholars, lawyers, and activists who have studied and, in some instances, personally experienced the phenomena about which they write. In these informative, well-researched, and sometimes poignant essays, the authors examine and explain the policing of the black man. Excerpted from Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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