Racial profiling increase

[TB4000]

Study: Racial Profiling a Growing Problem





By SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Authorities' targeting of people because of their racial background or religious affiliation is a deep-rooted problem in the United States, with nearly 32 million people reporting they've been racially profiled, a human rights group said Monday.



The report by Amnesty International USA also said at least 87 million people — one in three — in the United States are at high risk of being victimized because they belong to a racial, ethnic or religious group whose members are commonly targeted by police for unlawful stops and searches.
Racial profiling is a growing problem as the government has expanded its war on terror, the report said. Police, immigration and airport security procedures are the areas where the problem has gotten worse since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it said.

Citizens and visitors of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent, and others who appear to be from these areas or members of the Muslim and Sikh faiths, have become more frequent subjects of racial profiling over the last three years, the study said.

Such racial profiling is a distraction to law enforcement and therefore, undermines national security efforts, the report said. As police primarily focus on Arab, Muslim and South Asian males, it said, they are more likely to overlook terrorists who are white.
For example, recent cases of American Taliban John Walker Lindh and British shoe bomber Richard Reid show that al-Qaida has an ability to recruit a diverse range of sympathizers. These two would not necessarily have been identified by policies that focus on Arab, Muslim and South Asian males, the report said.

Aside from the ill-effects on victims — depression and humiliation — racial profiling reinforces residential segregation, creates fear and mistrust and engenders reluctance in reporting crimes and cooperating with police officers, Amnesty International USA said.

"In these times of domestic insecurity, our nation simply cannot afford to tolerate practices and policies that build walls between individuals or communities and those who are charged with the duty of protecting all of us," it said.

State laws continue to be insufficient in addressing the problem, according to the report.

Twenty-seven states do not ban racial profiling, the report said. Also, 46 states don't ban religious profiling, 35 continue to allow pedestrian "stop and frisk" searches and only six of the 15 that ban these searches use a definition of racial profiling that can actually be enforced, the report said.
No jurisdiction in the United States has addressed the problem in a way that is effective and comprehensive, the report said. As of August, bills dealing with racial profiling had been introduced in 41 states and passed in 29 — with only 23 of these states actually banning the practice outright, the report said.
The group endorsed bills introduced in the House by Reps. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and in the Senate by Democrat Russell Feingold of Wisconsin that would ban racial profiling at all levels of government.

Amnesty International USA came up with its estimate of nearly 32 million profiling victims by analyzing a collection of recent polls, census figures and studies, including a 2002 examination by George Washington University's sociology department. The group heard from scores of victims during a year of hearings around the country.

___

[hooligan]

If the number's aren't true, it points out that a large amount of us citizens live in fear of our government. It's sad to see how much this has affected the society we live in.

[Faithless]

The group endorsed bills introduced in the House by Reps. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and in the Senate by Democrat Russell Feingold of Wisconsin that would ban racial profiling at all levels of government.
One of those bills is the "End Racial Profiling Act of 2004" (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR03847:@@@L&summ2=m&).

H.R.3847
Title: To prohibit racial profiling.
Sponsor: Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] (introduced 2/26/2004) Cosponsors (124)
Related Bills: S.2132

Status: Latest Major Action: 4/2/2004 Referred to House subcommittee. Status: Referred to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

SUMMARY AS OF:
2/26/2004--Introduced.

End Racial Profiling Act of 2004 - Prohibits any law enforcement agent or agency from engaging in racial profiling. Authorizes the United States or an individual injured by racial profiling to bring a civil action for declaratory or injunctive relief in State court or U.S. district court. Makes proof that the routine or spontaneous investigatory activities of law enforcement agents in a jurisdiction have had a disparate impact on racial, ethnic, or religious minorities prima facie evidence of a violation. Authorizes the court to allow a prevailing plaintiff attorney's fees under specified circumstances.

Directs Federal law enforcement agencies to: (1) cease practices that encourage racial profiling; and (2) maintain policies and procedures to eliminate racial profiling, including the collection of data on routine investigatory activities, procedures for responding meaningfully to complaints alleging racial profiling, and procedures to discipline agents who engage in racial profiling.

Requires that an application by a State, local , or Indian tribal government for funding under the Byrne, Cops on the Beat, or Local Law Enforcement Block Grant program include a certification that such government: (1) maintains adequate policies and procedures designed to eliminate racial profiling; and (2) has ceased any practices that encourage racial profiling.

Authorizes the Attorney General to make grants to States and specified entities to develop and implement best practice devices and systems to ensure the racially neutral administration of justice.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

If the number's aren't true, it points out that a large amount of us citizens live in fear of our government. It's sad to see how much this has affected the society we live in.
Yeah, but I have my doubts that the number is true. There are people who get racially profiled. Then there are people who act stupid, get caught on it by the cops, and try to get off the hook by claiming the cops were racist.

[Faithless]

"China is the biggest (espionage) threat to the U.S. today," says Mr. Szady, now 61 years old and the FBI's top counterintelligence official.

FBI sees big threat from Chinese spies (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05222/551701.stm)

At some point, you wonder if they've got to be thinking that they've got to keep an eye on the clean-skins in the US. :rolleyes:

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 * By Jay Solomon, The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- Back in the 1980s, David Szady was among the premier Soviet spy catchers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, studying every aspect of the Kremlin's mole network. Today, he is mobilizing agents across the U.S. to sniff out spies from a new rival: Beijing.

"China is the biggest (espionage) threat to the U.S. today," says Mr. Szady, now 61 years old and the FBI's top counterintelligence official.

In one of their biggest initiatives after the fight against terrorism, the FBI and Justice Department have sent hundreds of new counterintelligence agents into the bureau's 56 field offices, many with a specific focus on China. The FBI's biggest counter-Chinese effort -- focusing on economic espionage -- occupies an unmarked floor in a Silicon Valley office park near a popular Chinese restaurant.

But this is an altogether different battle from the one with the Soviets. Even as concerns mount in Washington about China's increasing economic and military might, the government faces charges of racial profiling from Asian-American advocacy groups, ambivalence from some business groups and sometimes vague laws on technology exports. And it is having trouble making some of its cases stick.

The nature of the threat is different, too. Thousands of Chinese nationals regularly come to the U.S. as students and businessmen, some working for major U.S. defense contractors -- something the Russians could only have dreamed of during the Cold War. They are welcomed with open arms by universities and companies who prize their technical acumen and links to capital and low-cost labor back home.

The vast majority of them are in the U.S. innocently working or studying. Counterespionage experts say the trouble often starts when they are contacted by Chinese government officials or one of the more than 3,000 Chinese "front companies" the FBI alleges have been set up in the U.S. specifically to acquire military or industrial technologies illegally.

"They can work on so many levels that China may prove more difficult to contain than the Russian threat," Mr. Szady says.

The U.S. government is prosecuting about a dozen cases against individuals alleged to have sent technology to China illegally. FBI officials say at least three more will likely go ahead in the coming months. Over the past five years, the total number of such charges has grown by around 15 percent annually, according to some FBI agents.

Most of the cases involve small, lesser-known tech firms. But Sun Microsystems Inc. and Transmeta Corp. were the targets in one alleged plot, where two Chinese nationals who had worked at the software and semiconductor giants were arrested at the San Francisco airport allegedly holding proprietary data from the companies. The pair were charged with economic espionage and the case is pending. The FBI's Business Alliance, established a year ago, has been meeting regularly with leading defense contractors to understand what technologies they are developing and what potential threats are posed by company employees. The participants include Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and Raytheon Co.

The FBI campaign is part of a broader shift in Washington, where more and more policy makers see China's rapid economic rise as a threat to the U.S. both militarily and economically. That rising sentiment is seen in the heated debate over the recent failed bid by China's state-owned oil company Cnooc Ltd. for California's Unocal Corp. The Pentagon has caused a stir in recent months by raising the prospect that China's secretive military buildup could pose a significant long-term threat to the Asian region and the U.S.

Chu Maoming, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, calls the FBI's assertion that Beijing is coordinating spying activities inside the U.S. "totally groundless."

Many people in Silicon Valley are concerned that the FBI is overreaching. Asian-Americans worry about a new wave of racial profiling and say the crackdown is reminiscent of the 2000 case of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born American scientist who was fired from his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was prosecuted for allegedly giving away nuclear secrets to Beijing. After months in solitary confinement, all the espionage charges eventually were dropped, though Mr. Lee pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of mishandling top-secret information.

Business executives, meanwhile, fear a chill in commerce. "There's a bit of a disconnect between how the law-enforcement agencies see" the risk of espionage and how the business community does, says Harris Miller, the Washington-based president of the Information Technology Association of America, one of the high-tech industry's principal lobbying groups. He says many U.S. companies are dependent upon manufacturing and conducting research in places such as China -- and on the talents of Chinese employees.

"There's a real advantage to work with foreign nationals, as they're very talented," Mr. Miller says. "You don't want to turn them away just because they are not born in the U.S."

Even some of the victims of alleged Chinese espionage have mixed feelings about the FBI's campaign.

Executives at 3DGeo Development Inc., which makes software applications for geophysical imaging for the oil and gas industry, suspected it had a spy problem when it brought in Yan Ming Shan at the request of his Chinese employer, the state-owned oil company PetroChina Co., for software training. The Chinese oil giant earlier had sent an employee to train at 3DGeo's Santa Clara, California, campus, but he was ejected from the facility after trying to gain access to the software company's secured systems. Mr. Shan then appeared and was expelled after doing the same thing. Mr. Shan later was arrested at San Francisco international airport and accused of seeking to pass on some of 3DGeo's proprietary software programs to PetroChina.

Mr. Shan, a Chinese national, was sentenced last December to two years in prison for illegally accessing 3DGeo's computers.

Dimitri Bevc, 3DGeo's president, says the episode highlights a dilemma for the company, which is seeking to secure its intellectual property but also expand its business in Asia. "There's incredible demand from Chinese firms that are hungry for technology," says Mr. Bevc. "But we are built on our own intellectual property."

Now Mr. Bevc is afraid that his company is being punished in the Chinese marketplace. The company still is seeking payments from PetroChina for work already completed, says Mr. Bevc, and 3DGeo's sales representative said his Chinese sales prospects had been drying up. "What we heard back was ... that 3DGeo did something wrong" by taking action against Mr. Shan, who served most of his sentence while awaiting trial and has since returned to China, Mr. Bevc says.

PetroChina declined to comment on the case. Nicholas Humy, an attorney for Mr. Shan, said his client pleaded guilty only to illegally accessing 3DGeo's computer system and not to stealing the company's software or seeking to pass it on to a foreign entity. "The government never proved to a jury ... that Mr. Shan was trying to commit industrial espionage," Mr. Humy said.

On the military side, prosecutors at the San Jose, California, offices of the Department of Justice are preparing for an October trial of two Silicon Valley residents. The pair were indicted in June 2004 for allegedly signing contracts with Chinese military-related entities for the mass production of components to produce thermal imaging cameras. Technology industry officials say the case highlights the murkiness of export laws.

The case involves Night Vision Technology Corp., a San Jose-based firm that procures infrared technology and other high-tech equipment for overseas buyers, particularly in Taiwan. The company is headed by Martin Shih, 62, a Taiwanese-Canadian executive with experience as an electrical engineer, working both in Canada and in California with Loral Space & Communications Ltd., a satellite-communications company. Mr. Shih's Taiwanese-American consultant, Philip Cheng, also was charged.

Pretrial motions filed by the two men's attorneys speak to the belief of many in the technology industry that U.S. laws guarding technology exports are difficult to interpret because so often the technologies have legitimate commercial applications. They also say products such as infrared cameras can't be blocked for export because they have numerous commercial applications, such as use in consumer electronics items. The lawyers also point out that the equipment can be purchased on the open market in countries such as France.

"The indictment does not allege -- and the government cannot plausibly argue" that the infrared products "were 'specifically designed, modified, or configured for military use,' " according to one of the motions by the lawyers, quoting from the indictment.

An attorney for Mr. Shih, K.C. Maxwell, said her client would plead not guilty in the October trial. An attorney for Mr. Cheng, Matt Pavone, declined to comment.

The FBI has had a difficult time making similar charges stick against other alleged Chinese spies. In May, Chinese businessman Qing Chang Jiang was acquitted in a California court on charges of illegally exporting microwave amplifiers, which can be used in radar and missile systems, to the Beijing government.

The technology is involved in so many nonmilitary commercial applications -- such as consumer electronics -- that many companies aren't aware they need a license to export it, say attorneys who have worked on these cases. Mr. Jiang's lawyer says the U.S. company from which he got the technology, L-3 Communications Corp.'s Narda Microwave-West, told him he didn't need a license and so he went ahead with the sale.

A spokeswoman for L-3 Communications declined to comment. But the U.S. Department of Commerce said L-3 Communications was aware that an export license was required and that the company worked closely with the government on the case.

Mr. Jiang was convicted on a lesser charge of making false statements to federal investigators and is awaiting sentencing in California. His attorney, Tom Nolan, believes the U.S. government is systematically targeting Asian businessmen. "They're trying to prevent Chinese industry from doing business in the U.S.," he says.

Community leaders note that the number of Asian-Americans applying for government research jobs plummeted after the Wen Ho Lee case, and warn of a similar mutually destructive chill now. "At a time when the U.S. government is so dependent on the scientific skills of our community, it seems crazy that they've taken steps that dampen our desire to serve," says Cecilia Chang, a Fremont, California-based Asian-American activist who led many protests and donation drives for Mr. Lee.

That could have a big impact on American academia and commerce. About 150,000 Chinese students are studying in the U.S., according to the FBI, and the number of new admissions has been rising. Nearly 64,000 Chinese students entered the U.S. last year, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, up from 55,000 in 1998. All told, about 700,000 Chinese tourists and business executives visit the U.S. each year.

The swirl of suspicions and tensions between the FBI, China, and the Chinese-American community has surfaced even among the bureau's own agents. Mr. Szady has made a point of hiring more Asian-Americans into his counterespionage network. Yet twice in the past two years, the FBI has turned on its own Chinese-American employees in Los Angeles, accusing them of having aided Beijing.

Mr. Szady acknowledges the inherent complexity of monitoring the Chinese community in the U.S., and says he is trying to find a balance: "How do you protect without being overbearing?" But he argues that it is the Chinese government, not the FBI, that is blurring the lines between legitimate transborder commerce and national rivalry. He says Beijing doesn't recognize the concept of Chinese-Americans. In the government's eyes, "they are all overseas Chinese," says Mr. Szady, a lanky former chemistry student who his agents call the "Z Man."

Mr. Szady and other FBI experts believe China began intensifying its spying operations in the late 1970s, when warming relations between Washington and Beijing opened the way for hundreds of thousands of Chinese to begin visiting the U.S. annually. These analysts say units of the People's Liberation Army and China's Ministry of State Security oversee intelligence operations, and that the state-run Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics has targeted U.S. weapons labs.

In addition, the Beijing government runs an extensive, informal, decentralized spy network, counterespionage experts allege. In most cases, Beijing's spy agencies don't send trained agents to the U.S. to penetrate companies and government agencies, but rather simply seek to glean information from the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who visit and study in the U.S. every year. They also try to get Chinese-Americans to provide information, appealing to their desire to help uplift China's economy.

"In almost all of its collections operations, China is not so much looking at opportunities for stealing things ... as devising all sorts of opportunities for you to come to the conclusion that you would be willing to give at least some of these things," says Paul Moore, who was the FBI's top China analyst from 1978 through 1998. "It's the mundane, day-to-day contacts that are killing us, not the exotic spy operations."

[Chu Chi]

. Police, immigration and airport security procedures are the areas where the problem has gotten worse since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it said.

Citizens and visitors of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent, and others who appear to be from these areas or members of the Muslim and Sikh faiths, have become more frequent subjects of racial profiling over the last three years, the study said.

___

What is the difference between "racial profiling" and racism?

(you can run the experiment by copying and pasting the document in MS word and then replacing the term "racial profiling" with racism)




If there is no difference, why not use the word racism?

In addition, you are being led to believe that 911 is the cause of the racism.

If this is true, what did Black people DO to to justify the practice of racism against them?

CC

[Banana]

Racism means that you believe one race is superior to another while racial profiling means you single out someone based on something they possess as part of a racial demographic.

[Faithless]

Article: Such racial profiling is a distraction to law enforcement and therefore, undermines national security efforts, the report said. As police primarily focus on Arab, Muslim and South Asian males, it said, they are more likely to overlook terrorists who are white.

Like the damn skinheads. And knowing that terrorist analysts aren't really looking at the skinheads makes it all the easier for them to perpetrate their crimes. :frown:

Skinheads can easily cover their tattoos and wear respectable clothing to deceive police and immigration authorities, say police officials. An Italian police expert on gang activities said it is known skinheads travel as far as Australia, South Africa and the Indian sub-continent "at times looking like the boy next door or a student on vacation." He also revealed Italian agents are aware of a number of meetings between gang leaders, radical Islamic students and organized crime bosses.

The chilling possibility that Muslim terrorists and neo-Nazis may combine forces was raised as a distinct possibility by Israel's president last month.

Unholy alliance: Jihadists, Nazis Officials see growing terror ties (http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45618)

Posted: August 5, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin is an online, subscription intelligence news service from the creator of WorldNetDaily.com – a journalist who has been developing sources around the world for almost 30 years. The subscription price for the premium newsletter has been slashed in half and is now available for only $9.95 per month.

By Joseph Farah and Yoram East
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – Neo-Nazi skinheads are working with radical Islamists in a growing unholy alliance that has European law enforcement officials concerned about a new front in the war on terrorism, reports Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence newsletter published by the founder of WND.

Sources in the UK, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland and in the Middle East are warning that the world should not be surprised to see young, white males involved in terrorism and in league with Osama bin Laden.

Just a few years ago, Muslims represented one of the biggest harassment targets of neo-Nazi skinheads in Europe. But anti-Muslim hate crimes by skinheads have seen a dramatic drop-off – even as their movement takes on more visibility and bigger numbers.

"In business they ignore the race," said an Italian official.

Law enforcement officials fear skinheads and neo-Nazis could provide not just additional numbers to the Islamic terrorist cause but also some operatives who would defy profiling efforts.

Skinheads can easily cover their tattoos and wear respectable clothing to deceive police and immigration authorities, say police officials. An Italian police expert on gang activities said it is known skinheads travel as far as Australia, South Africa and the Indian sub-continent "at times looking like the boy next door or a student on vacation." He also revealed Italian agents are aware of a number of meetings between gang leaders, radical Islamic students and organized crime bosses.

The chilling possibility that Muslim terrorists and neo-Nazis may combine forces was raised as a distinct possibility by Israel's president last month.

On a visit to commemorate the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, Moshe Katsav declared, "Let us not be surprised if one day terror organizations use neo-Nazis to carry out terrorist attacks."

The majority of Muslims in Europe are law-abiding citizens, he added. But Muslim extremists may form alliances with neo-Nazis, he said.

What brings the groups together is a common enemy – Jews – and business interests, say law enforcement officials. Neo-Nazi skinheads are deeply involved in drug-running and human smuggling gangs – two areas of common interest with Islamists.

Long before Katsav warned about the links between the neo-Nazis and the jihadists, Germany's minister of the interior, Otto Schily, the Muslim Hizb ut-Tahir, or Party of Liberation, which had ties with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party. Hizb ut-Tahir, an organization with acolytes in many European countries, wants to unite the Muslim world in a single theocratic state under a caliph, or supreme Muslim leader.

Schily banned the group in 2002 after accusing it of "spreading violent propaganda and anti-Jewish agitation" and after receiving reports its representatives had met with members of the National Democratic Party in 2001. Schily is now considering a ban on activities by Hezbollah members in Germany.

Three million or more Muslims live in Germany, comprising about 4 percent of its population.

There is also a community of 100,000 ethnic German converts to Islam. One of them, Steven Smyrek, was arrested and imprisoned in Israel some years ago on charges of being a Hezbollah agent. He was released in 2004 in an Israel-Hezbollah prisoner swap, and now lives in Germany as a free man.

The mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Mohammed Atta, lived and studied in Hamburg, a major port in northern Germany.

Twenty-five thousand to 30,000 Muslims in Germany are members of radical Islamic organizations, according to a ministry of interior official.

Meanwhile, neo-Nazi skinhead numbers are swelling throughout Europe.

As Swiss President Samuel Schmid stood on the Rutli Meadow last week commemorating the Swiss Federation, he was shocked by more than 700 skinheads and neo-Nazis wearing black T-shirts who stood facing him, waving their fists in a Nazi salute.

The number of militants amounted to more than one third of the people attending the event, twice the number registered in the 2004 celebrations. The skinheads, waving the Swiss national flag, were not shy about chanting slogans such as "Schmid is a traitor," and other slurs aimed at minorities, especially against refugees from the third world. As is their common routine they also voiced hate expressions against the U.S. and the Jews.

Schmid was openly shaken as he realized he would not be able to finish his speech. He later expressed his anger and suggested that radical changes in future public celebrations of national day events should be seriously considered.

G2 Bulletin reports it has learned from a reliable source the stunned president did not waste any time contacting members of cabinet and other officials, telling them to get their act together and put an end to what he described as "hoodlums taking over a national holiday."

In reality it was the 10th year in a row that the extremists have made the journey to the legendary meadow on the shores of Lake Lucerne, and their numbers have increased each year.

An analysis of the overall proliferation of skinhead movements that originated in the UK, where they first appeared as gangs in the '60s, shows the Swiss numbers probably represent only a small fraction of the total number. Overall figures of those directly involved with skinheads, who later also joined neo-Nazi and fascist movements is well over 150,000 worldwide.

An Interpol source said the skinheads are well-organized, citing a number of events this year including a mass gathering during a concert near Germany. At that event, French and German police tried to stop hundreds of French and Italian skinheads and neo-Nazis from crossing the border into Germany.

Other notable events this year were neo-Nazi gatherings in Germany including Berlin and neo-Nazi and skinheads’ demonstrations in the Baltic States and Scandinavia. Skinheads and neo-Nazis are a growing menace in Poland and in parts of Russia where they are accused of having committed murders, arson attacks, robberies and of cooperating with organized crime elements.

Russian law enforcement agencies are witnessing constant clashes between skinhead gangs and the police and murders of foreigners.

A Swiss official with the federal police, reacting on the Rutli Meadow event, bitterly emphasized agents have to divert attention from pressing issues related to the global war on terrorism to monitor skinheads, neo-Nazis, bikers and other street gangs.

They need to recognize who is who in these radical movements and to prevent gangs from becoming hired guns or suppliers of forged documents, weapons and explosives later used against governments at war with jihadi Islam.

The danger posed by the skinhead-Islamist alliance is being compared with the fast-growing menace of Central American street gangs, such as the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, who are now the largest and most dangerous criminal group in several Latin American countries and in the U.S. MS-13, too, has been known to meet with al-Qaida operatives and is believed to be involved in smuggling some into the U.S. across the Mexican border

[Chu Chi]

Racism means that you believe one race is superior to another while racial profiling means you single out someone based on something they possess as part of a racial demographic.

Banana, how do you PROVE a person believes something?


CC

[Banana]

You can gauge racism by actions and beliefs.

[Grasshopper]

In addition, you are being led to believe that 911 is the cause of the racism.
No, I believe 9-11 WAS racism. I think the 9-11 attacks were a kind of Arab racism that was masked by Islam.

Many of the 9-11 attackers were racist Arabs with a supremacy complex incl. toward other muslims.

The Wahhabbi sect in Arabia whose ideas inform Bin Laden's agenda was created in part as a reaction to Turkish islam.

These Arabs saw themselves as the "chosen people" of Islam and all of humanity.

If this is true, what did Black people DO to to justify the practice of racism against them?

CC
If by so called racism you mean racial profiling of people for particular crimes than what blacks have done is be born into a group that is disproportionately committing injustice in America.

Look at the crime rates. In murder, assault, rape, armed robbery and many other crimes blacks are more likely than any other group in America to commit these crimes.

Innocent blacks will be sometimes put into this category.

Same with other groups. Catholic priests, White men with southern accents, etc., all will be "profiled," racially or otherwise in a negative way due to the behavior of many people in their social category.

The real question to be asked in why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime.

Why?

GH

[hooligan]

No, I believe 9-11 WAS racism. I think the 9-11 attacks were a kind of Arab racism that was masked by Islam.

Many of the 9-11 attackers were racist Arabs with a supremacy complex incl. toward other muslims.

The Wahhabbi sect in Arabia whose ideas inform Bin Laden's agenda was created in part as a reaction to Turkish islam.

These Arabs saw themselves as the "chosen people" of Islam and all of humanity.

If by so called racism you mean racial profiling of people for particular crimes than what blacks have done is be born into a group that is disproportionately committing injustice in America.

Look at the crime rates. In murder, assault, rape, armed robbery and many other crimes blacks are more likely than any other group in America to commit these crimes.

Innocent blacks will be sometimes put into this category.

Same with other groups. Catholic priests, White men with southern accents, etc., all will be "profiled," racially or otherwise in a negative way due to the behavior of many people in their social category.

The real question to be asked in why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime.

Why?

GH

We have a winner.

Funny how a thread about racial profiling brings in stereotypes Blacks as violent.

You can gauge racism by actions and beliefs.

And words and posts, and can you really spot a racist from a non-racist? The most obvious ones say what they mean, but we're all racist in some way or another. Look at the poster I just quoted.

[Banana]

I don't want to say that the comments are naturally "racist" but more along the lines of stereotypical. Sure, you can put stereotyping under the umbrella of racism but his comments hardly portray him as someone that believes blacks are inferior.

And I know I hate saying this but stereotypes are usually based on some sort of truth. Some stereotypes hold more or less truth than others which is based on one's own experiences.

[Chad]

Even beyond debating the morality of racial profiling, does it even work?? Does it give results that outweigh the problems it creates? The answer is no.
Innocent people get harassed, arrested, and assaulted by police. It breeds hatred between the races and contempt for police. We've already seen this happen over and over again and sometimes it becomes an explosive situation like with the L.A. riots.
It's not a reliable system for catching criminals but it's easy to deceive yourself about this in a high-crime area.
Since most rapes are committed by men, is it reasonable to randomly accuse men of rape?

[Grasshopper]

We have a winner.

Funny how a thread about racial profiling brings in stereotypes Blacks as violent.
Why do you fear telling the truth about race and crime in America? You aren't afraid of black males are you? Or do you just like the feeling of smug satisfaction in believing you are just too "progressive" to admit certain truths?

As I wrote - " Look at the crime rates. In murder, assault, rape, armed robbery and many other crimes blacks are more likely than any other group in America to commit these crimes.

Innocent blacks will be sometimes put into this category.

The real question to be asked in why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime.

Why?
These are factual statements not stereotypes. The fallback position for reality phobic leftists like you is not to deny these truths but to say - "Well, blacks are victims of their environment and 400 years of White oppression. So it's not their fault if they disproportionately commmit violent crimes". :rolleyes:

hooligan - And words and posts, and can you really spot a racist from a non-racist? The most obvious ones say what they mean, but we're all racist in some way or another. Look at the poster I just quoted.
There was nothing "racist" in my post.

But on some level you probably know that.

I reject the view that the truth is "racist".

[hooligan]

Why do you fear telling the truth about race and crime in America? You aren't afraid of black males are you? Or do you just like the feeling of smug satisfaction in believing you are just too "progressive" to admit certain truths?

As I wrote - "
These are factual statements not stereotypes. The fallback position for reality phobic leftists like you is not to deny these truths but to say - "Well, blacks are victims of their environment and 400 years of White oppression. So it's not their fault if they disproportionately commmit violent crimes". :rolleyes:

There was nothing "racist" in my post.
But on some level you probably know that.
I reject the view that the truth is "racist".

What is up with idiots and their emoticons? Here, what I understand about race and crime in America is that there is more to just blaming a group of people because of their connections to crime. Why don't you look at rates for white violent crime offenders? How about APIAs? Rejecting racism simply because you think that trends back up your unfound beliefs?

Hey! there are a large majority of African American violent offenders, it must be African Americans are violent! Right, the majority of Asians are immigrants, must mean that they have no hope of acculturation. Forever foreigners. Hats off to you, you're just a brimming bowl of intellect.

Since most rapes are committed by men, is it reasonable to randomly accuse men of rape? For real.

[Napoleon Chynamite]

Well since black people are also disproportionately poorer, and blue-collar crimes are more common statistically among the poor for a variety of different reasons (desperation and struggling to make ends meet, broken families and lack of available education and socialization of values, etc.), this might explain a lot of it. Furthermore, the crimes the vast majority of white people commit are most likely to be white-collar, if only because they can afford to commit such crimes that are more undetectable and easier to get away with.

[draconisz]

Grasshopper. . .again. . .I like to see your "facts". Do you even know what "racial profiling" is?

No, I believe 9-11 WAS racism. I think the 9-11 attacks were a kind of Arab racism that was masked by Islam.

Many of the 9-11 attackers were racist Arabs with a supremacy complex incl. toward other muslims.

The Wahhabbi sect in Arabia whose ideas inform Bin Laden's agenda was created in part as a reaction to Turkish islam.

These Arabs saw themselves as the "chosen people" of Islam and all of humanity.


If by so called racism you mean racial profiling of people for particular crimes than what blacks have done is be born into a group that is disproportionately committing injustice in America.

Look at the crime rates. In murder, assault, rape, armed robbery and many other crimes blacks are more likely than any other group in America to commit these crimes.

Innocent blacks will be sometimes put into this category.

Same with other groups. Catholic priests, White men with southern accents, etc., all will be "profiled," racially or otherwise in a negative way due to the behavior of many people in their social category.

The real question to be asked in why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime.

Why?

GH

[Chu Chi]

You can gauge racism by actions and *beliefs.*


The question Banana was: How do you prove what someone believes?

What is the purpose of the word "beliefs" in your answer?

CC

[Banana]

And the answer was: You can prove someone believes in racism with their actions and how they project their ideas onto others.

As long as someone "believes" that one race is superior to another, that's racism. Do you want me to explain what orange is to a blind man next?

[robotic]

actions such as racial profiling try to set the consequence correct, but the consequence, such as terrorism, cannot be fixed if the piece from the jigsaw is missing. it is hiding from a root.
stereotypes cannot be uplifted because of their false assumption towards a majority/minority situation, and in this way, stereotypes adhering to an ethnicity are an equivalent of a bad or good quality (or a very prominent one), than necessarily fact and non-fiction. dependent on a personal point-of-view. for some, asians being smart can be both an admirable quality, and a deplored one, for a portion of gangsters for instance, african-americans commiting crime would not be a draw-back, and for the government, a problem that needs to be solved, a problem; a consequence.
maybe the root cause lies in the mentality of the society, just like stereotypes. i think more than anything, more than the truth behind the lie and the lie behind the truth, we could try to see beyond the mist. any one who is involved. the people looking towards, and the people being subjected.

grasshopper, if we choose to accept that yes, there could be truth behind african-americans committing crime. and that is the answer. the answer is just that. places like yellowworld are trying shape that mentality that builds towards a negative - a destruction of hope and esteem. if we conclude the story at this person is violent, that person has a complex, etc. we won't be able to solve the problem that we're striving to mould. maybe the real problem lies in the way we view the situation, rather than what we are willing to do about it.

[Chu Chi]

And the answer was: You can prove someone believes in racism with their actions and how they project their ideas onto others.

As long as someone "believes" that one race is superior to another, that's racism. ?

If two people each say they "believe" their race is superior, how do you know which one is correct?


CC

[Banana]

It's not about which race is indeed superior that makes a racist comment racist but rather the belief that one is superior to another. In this case, both people are racist but neither is correct.

[Chu Chi]

It's not about which race is indeed superior that makes a racist comment racist but rather the belief that one is superior to another. In this case, both people are racist but neither is correct.


You didn't answer the question.

Lets review your position:

You say racism is a "belief"

You say a persons "belief" can be proven by their actions (what they do)

Now back to my question which I have refined:


If two people each say they "believe" their race is SMARTER, how do you PROVE which one is truly smarter?


CC

[Arex]

^--- He's not saying that a belief is proven "true" or "correct" by one's actions, but that one's beliefs can be ascertained by looking at one's actions. One method of "proving" someone holds a belief is by observing their actions or listening to what they say.

RX

[Chu Chi]

^--- He's not saying that a belief is proven "true" or "correct" by one's actions, but that one's beliefs can be ascertained by looking at one's actions. One method of "proving" someone holds a belief is by observing their actions or listening to what they say.

RX

I agree with you Arex.

What a person says and or does determines what they are, whether they believe they are or not.

The reason I stress this point is because you will find many White people who practice racism who will say they don't BELIEVE Whites are superior.

A good judge doesn't even bother asking a suspect what they believe.

Why?

Because suspects can lie.



CC

[Marshall Law]

No, I believe 9-11 WAS racism. I think the 9-11 attacks were a kind of Arab racism that was masked by Islam.

Many of the 9-11 attackers were racist Arabs with a supremacy complex incl. toward other muslims.

The Wahhabbi sect in Arabia whose ideas inform Bin Laden's agenda was created in part as a reaction to Turkish islam.

These Arabs saw themselves as the "chosen people" of Islam and all of humanity.


If by so called racism you mean racial profiling of people for particular crimes than what blacks have done is be born into a group that is disproportionately committing injustice in America.

Look at the crime rates. In murder, assault, rape, armed robbery and many other crimes blacks are more likely than any other group in America to commit these crimes.

here we go again...

How come all roads almost always lead back to blacks doing something (usually negative). This thread is about racial profiling in regards to terrorism yet you single out blacks specifically...

Innocent blacks will be sometimes put into this category.

Same with other groups. Catholic priests, White men with southern accents, etc., all will be "profiled," racially or otherwise in a negative way due to the behavior of many people in their social category.

you say this as if it should be considered an acceptable loss..


The real question to be asked in why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime.

Why?

GH
Why is it when someone wants to point out anything about blacks (which is usually in a negative way) they hold up crime stats YET completely disregard other things that go into making that statistic look the way it does. Like institutional racism for one.

heres a real answer..

Those stats go back as far as the 1800s where there were numbers that suggested that blacks commited more crimes than anyone else. Whats NOT shown is that blacks could be BLAMED for crimes they didn't commit. Blacks couldn't testify against whites in trials. Many trials were kangaroo courts where all that was need was the "confirmation" of another white person and that was it. Those numbers are STILL a part of the larger stats that reflect crime and race in america.

Emmett Till
Medger Evers
Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing

Ever wonder why this cases are being settled some 40 to 60 YEARS after the crimes were committed? In some reports it was said that the white men that committed the crimes BRAGGED about it. In Medgar Evers case Byron De la beckwith had bruising on his shoulder consistent with the recoil of a high-powered rifle. In the case of the church bombing Herbert Hoover himself blocked the investigation. Only to have it reopened years later.

Do you think these are isolated incidences??

Even today blacks are MORE likely to be charged with a higher degree of crime (a felony as opposed to misdemeanor) than other groups especially whites, Blacks are more likely to pull MORE TIME for committing the SAME crime as other groups, especially whites. These are also FACTS that you and people like you seem to always neglect when raising the question "why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime"

Here's a fact no one ever mentions:
Blacks are also represented disporpotionately in military service. But no one bothers to say or show the sacrifices blacks are making at war for a country that seems bent on calling us little more than animals and malcontents.

Well since black people are also disproportionately poorer, and blue-collar crimes are more common statistically among the poor for a variety of different reasons (desperation and struggling to make ends meet, broken families and lack of available education and socialization of values, etc.), this might explain a lot of it. Furthermore, the crimes the vast majority of white people commit are most likely to be white-collar, if only because they can afford to commit such crimes that are more undetectable and easier to get away with.

There is a vast number of poor whites, blacks, asians and other poor people that get busted EVERYDAY in this country...only one type makes the nightly news regularly.

[hooligan]

There is a vast number of poor whites, blacks, asians and other poor people that get busted EVERYDAY in this country...only one type makes the nightly news regularly.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with your comment any more. (And Latinos, living in LA they seem to make the evening news more than any other groups).

[Marshall Law]

CORRECTION: not Herbert Hoover it was J. Edgar Hoover...

[nola]

The drug war is also a race war.

Whites are 76% of current drug users, while blacks are 13.5% and Latino/as are 9.2% of current drug users. Combined, these people of color comprise less than 23% of all drug users, but over the past several years, have come to represent 90% of all persons sent to jail or prison for a drug possession charge.

From an article from our anti-racism hero Tim Wise who wrote the article you posted about the Model Minority Myth (he is to racism what Noam Chomsky is to the American government):

by Tim Wise | 08.24.02

The war on drugs never came to my college dorm. Not because of insufficient enemies in sight—for indeed there were plenty—but rather because the drug war has rarely ever made its way to the cloistered residences of mostly white, well-off private school co-eds. Too busy busting the black and brown in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, I guess, to make a stop Uptown, where the Tulane freshmen on the 8th floor of Monroe Hall were busy filling up two foot bong chambers with pot smoke, and then inhaling until our eyes rolled back in our heads.

It's not like the drug warriors didn't know we were there. They've seen the studies on college drug use; they know what's going on in the dorms, in the frat houses, and in the cramped college apartments. The campus cops know, the Administration knows, and the city police know too. They know but they don't care; for the white and economically-advantaged, drugs have been essentially decriminalized for a long time.

Back in high school even, weekend parties at the homes of fellow white brethren would be routinely visited by police who had received a noise complaint. Although I find it hard to believe that they could have missed either the underage drinking or the smell of pot smoke hanging in the air, never once did they search anyone, raid the house, or make a bust. They would ask us politely to turn down the music, hop in their cruisers, and head down to the 'hood to arrest some folks who had made the mistake of doing their drugs somewhere other than our party.

Or on the road following the Grateful Dead in 1990 (don't ask): a traveling pharmaceutical warehouse if ever there was one. Everyone knew that the falafel stand was a front; that there was hash in the brownies; that nobody dances like that who isn't dosed out of their mind. But when I slid quietly into the beat-up Chevy in the parking lot to purchase my daily supply of psilocybin (hallucinogenic mushrooms, for those who don't know), I never worried about whether the dealer was a cop. After all, it was the Grateful Dead and the crowd was white; surely there had to be some black folks in Louisville to shake down; maybe a LL Cool J show to bust up.

Oh sure, I know there are some white college kids who have been busted in drug raids; and yes, some have even done time. I know one of these folks myself actually; arrested at a different University than my own for selling acid—lots of it. And yes he went to prison; and now he's out; and he's the President of a company just five years after his release from the joint. Note to self: if I ever decide to sell drugs, make sure to be rich first, so I can have a nice range of opportunities waiting for me upon my release. I'm already white, so I figure I'm halfway home.

This is all to say that if we're going to understand the implications of the war on drugs, we have to go beyond the standard analysis. It's one thing, after all, to note the costs of this war to people of color—and many writers have done a marvelous job of that, including Silja Talvi in this issue—but it's quite another to recognize the flipside of that cost: that for every black or Latino or American Indian casualty in the drug war, there are thousands, or indeed millions of white folks who broke the same laws, did the same drugs, sold the same merchandise, and yet the closest they've been to a prison cell is watching OZ on a flat-screen TV.

Even in the midst of the insanity that is the war on drugs, there is white privilege. Not just class privilege—for there are plenty of middle class black and brown folks wearing prison blues and plenty of poor and working class whites whose indulgence of narcotics gets ignored—but race privilege. The kind of privilege that keeps one from being suspected (despite the studies that show whites are equally or more likely to use drugs than blacks and Latinos); keeps us from getting searched (despite the fact that according to the Department of Justice, whites are twice as likely as blacks to have drugs in our cars when we are searched); keeps us from getting arrested; and keeps us from going to jail. At the worst, it's off to rehab: 28 days and out; and then it's back to that two-foot bong; back to poppin' X at the club; back to makin' pipes out of Pepsi cans—anything to get high. Crazy shit. And everyone knows it and looks the other way.

White privilege: the same privilege that makes Amsterdam a hip, bohemian, cosmopolitan hangout for world travelers looking for a good high; but renders South Central L.A.—where you can also score some pretty good shit—a place that white folks are afraid to even look at on a map. Not hip, not cool, and definitely not a tourist destination.

White privilege: the same privilege that renders low-income black folks "crackheads" in the eyes of much of white America while characterizing low-income whites as innocuous "Joe Six-packs"—a reference to a nice, legal drug—no matter how much of the hard stuff these folks ingest.

Not that I'm suggesting a new front for the drug war, of course. It's just that so long as we allow a public policy to criminalize entire generations of youth of color, while ignoring the equally illegal proclivities of their pale-skinned counterparts, we not only guarantee that the war on drugs can never succeed (since it's tough to win a war when you ignore 76% of the folks whose behavior classifies them technically as the adversary), but we also further entrench racial inequity and de facto apartheid in the criminal justice system. Indeed, this apartheid extends far beyond the justice system, since a drug conviction severely diminishes a person's prospects for future employment, stable families, and even a person's ability to participate in civic life as a voter.

It's important to quantify this kind of thing. Anecdotes are nice, of course: they illustrate points, and I've got lots of 'em. Like the fact that I saw more drugs on the high school competitive debate circuit in one month than I ever saw in an entire year, working in public housing as a community organizer.

But anecdotes can't make points of their own accord. So it's more effective, in some ways, to take a look at the statistics on who gets arrested for drugs, and compare that to the available data on who actually uses drugs, or sells them. By doing so, we can not only gain insight into the devastation wrought upon people of color by the drug warriors, but can also begin to quantify the numbers of whites whose presence in the free world, and without an arrest record, is merely a matter of racial preference: affirmative inaction, if you will, on the part of law enforcement.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 6.4% of whites and 6.4% of blacks, age twelve and older, are current drug users; so, too, for 5.3% of Latinos that age. This translates into approximately 10.7 million whites, 1.9 million blacks, and 1.3 million Latinos who have used drugs in the past month. Whites are 76% of current users, while blacks are 13.5% and Latino/as are 9.2% of current drug users. Combined, these people of color comprise less than 23% of all drug users, but over the past several years, have come to represent 90% of all persons sent to jail or prison for a drug possession charge.

Beyond percentages, what does this mean? Look at it this way. In 2000, there were a little more than one million arrests for drugs in the United States. Most of these arrests resulted in state of local drug charges, although there were also about 33,000 federal drug arrests. While the federal arrests were almost all for distribution and manufacture, the state and local level cases were overwhelmingly for mere possession. Indeed, roughly 75% of all drug arrests annually are possession arrests. This means that in 2000, there were essentially 750,000 arrests for possession alone.

Of the total, thirty-five percent of those arrested (roughly 350,000) were African American. If seventy-five percent of these were for possession, this means that approximately 263,000 blacks were arrested in 2000 for possession alone; this, despite being less than 14% of users (and thus, possessors of narcotics at any given moment).

In that same year, data tells us that whites were a little over 64% of all persons arrested for drugs. But there's a problem: namely, those the government classifies as "Hispanic" are rolled in with the white folks. Furthermore, given what we know from federal drug arrest data (where Hispanics arrested are looked at separately), the percentage of Latinos arrested for drugs is well above their share of the racially-"white" population, and well above their share of actual drug offenders. Even if we assume that Latinos are only arrested for drugs at a rate that is double their share of the population (a conservative guess given federal data where they comprise nearly half of all arrests), this would mean that at roughly eleven percent of the 12-and-over "white" population, Latino "whites" would represent at least twenty-two percent of drug arrests: roughly 220,000. Of these, at least three-quarters (or 165,000) would be for possession alone.

This would leave approximately 447,000 drug arrests of non-Hispanic whites, or 43% of the total arrests for drugs in 2000. Of these, 335,000 or so would be for possession alone. In other words, the group that comprises 76% of all drug users would represent well under half of all possession arrests.

If we assume that the various law enforcement agencies have the resources to arrest 750,000 people each year for drug possession, calculating the privilege of being a white user isn't very difficult. If enforcement followed relative rates of violation, more than three-quarters of those busted would be white. That would mean 570,000 white folks arrested each year for drug possession, as opposed to the 335,000 currently arrested: a difference of 235,000 whites every year, not being arrested, not getting a record, not being prosecuted, and not facing jail time, irrespective of their actions. By the same token, there would be only a little more than 100,000 blacks busted for possession each year: a number that is less than four-tenths as large as the 263,000 African Americans actually getting popped for possession. For Latinos, enforcement based on rates of violation would bring less than 70,000 possession arrests annually, as opposed to the low-ball estimate of 165,000 for 2000.

Imagine what this kind of reality would do for the complexion of the burgeoning jail and prison industry; what impact it would have on common stereotypes of criminality and drug use in particular.

Even among drug dealers, evidence suggests that blacks are only 16% of persons who sell drugs, while whites (including Hispanics) are 82%. Even if we make the absurdly high estimation that half of that white total is ethnically Hispanic, this would still mean that around four in ten dealers are Caucasian. Yet, at the federal level, where most of the distribution arrests are made, only one-fourth of those busted are white. Over the course of the last decade, that would mean that tens of thousands of whites who sold drugs escaped notice, arrest and long-term confinement.

Over the course of the nearly two-decades-long war on drugs, it is no exaggeration then to suggest that a few million white people have benefited directly from the racially-selective prosecution of said war. That is the measure of white privilege: a measure that has allowed those millions to continue to lead their lives, make money, get educations, start families and maintain them, vote for candidates for political office who will pass laws relating to drug policy, and generally escape the stigma that comes with a mug shot and prison ID number.

That's millions of white people, every bit as guilty as those of color, but who by virtue of their freedom—a gift from a justice system that ignores their wrongdoing—have been able to make hundreds of millions of dollars in income, and accumulate wealth, property, and additional advantages, relative to the equally substantial million or so who are black and brown and have been unable to accumulate the same because they instead have been labeled drug felons.

Indeed, much of white America owes damn near everything we have to the existence of racism as the framework for the War on Drugs. Without it, we'd be doing time.

That said, does white America really want to end institutional racism? Are we really prepared to give up the advantages to which we have grown accustomed? Do we really want to be treated as merely individuals? Or do we deep down want to be treated like members of a group—so long as the group is the one being afforded the free pass?

Are we prepared for what ending the war on drugs would mean, including forcing us to actually compete for jobs and college slots, and homes with an awful lot of people who up to now have been viewed as surplus, and written off? After all, a hundred thousand or so less blacks carted off to jail each year is a hundred thousand or so who will suddenly become available to move next door or date your daughter. And we know how most white folks feel about that.

And if it's too much to think about, we can always just pop another nitrous oxide canister, or hook up a gas mask to the two-foot bong (because two feet, after all, just isn't enough) and bake ourselves into oblivion. Who's going to stop us, after all?

[nola]

Why is it when someone wants to point out anything about blacks (which is usually in a negative way) they hold up crime stats YET completely disregard other things that go into making that statistic look the way it does. Like institutional racism for one.

heres a real answer..

Those stats go back as far as the 1800s where there were numbers that suggested that blacks commited more crimes than anyone else. Whats NOT shown is that blacks could be BLAMED for crimes they didn't commit. Blacks couldn't testify against whites in trials. Many trials were kangaroo courts where all that was need was the "confirmation" of another white person and that was it. Those numbers are STILL a part of the larger stats that reflect crime and race in america.

Even today blacks are MORE likely to be charged with a higher degree of crime (a felony as opposed to misdemeanor) than other groups especially whites, Blacks are more likely to pull MORE TIME for committing the SAME crime as other groups, especially whites. These are also FACTS that you and people like you seem to always neglect when raising the question "why so many blacks in America perpetrate injustice, esp. violent crime".Bump for the evening crowd.


I responded to this post with these statistics on the drug war which are an example of our apartheid-like criminal justice system:

Whites are 76% of current drug users, while blacks are 13.5% and Latino/as are 9.2% of current drug users. Combined, these people of color comprise less than 23% of all drug users, but over the past several years, have come to represent 90% of all persons sent to jail or prison for a drug possession charge.

Here is another article with similar statistics:



The Color of the Drug War

by Silja J.A. Talvi | 08.24.02

The drug war is a proxy for racism, says Andy Ko, Project Director of ACLU-Washington's Drug Policy Reform Project. "Most modern politicians wouldn't dream of explicitly advocating that society persecute or enslave poor people or members of minority communities. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of the 'get-tough-on-crime' drug war policies of the past few decades."

Ten years ago, perspectives such as these might still have been viewed as exaggerated, rhetorical stabs at trying to reverse the trend of skyrocketing U.S. incarceration rates.

But today, civil liberties attorneys like Ko are being joined by what amounts to a nationwide chorus of drug war dissenters.

"It's impossible, in the [sociohistorical] context that we're living in now, to think about civil and human rights without looking at the impact of the War on Drugs," says Sharda Sekaran, Associate Director of Public Policy and Community Outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance in New York. "We now have the vantage point from which to examine the impact of decades of failed drug policies on the nation's most vulnerable communities."

A Growing Movement

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), the nation's leading organization promoting alternatives to the War on Drugs, is gearing up for a national conference focusing on the impact of punitive drug policies on communities of color

"Breaking the Chains: People of Color and the War on Drugs" plans to bring hundreds of religious leaders, civil rights advocates, addiction treatment specialists, musicians and elected officials to downtown Los Angeles from September 26th-28th to discuss what the organization has unabashedly referred to as America's "apartheid-like" criminal justice system.

The conference hopes to build on the momentum generated in August 2001, when an ad-hoc group of more than 100 celebrities, politicians, religious leaders and drug policy reform activists (including Danny Glover, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, NAACP Chair Julian Bond and former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders) sent a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urging recognition of the War on Drugs as a "de facto form of racism." Representatives of the group then took their message to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, to generate discussion and awareness about the disproportionate arrest and sentencing of low-income minorities on drug-related charges in the U.S.

The time is right for the Los Angeles conference, says DPA's Sekaran, because the inequities are now "glaringly obvious." Citizen-supported initiatives favoring treatment over incarceration in states including New Mexico, Arizona, California and Washington have convinced some politicians that a shift away from incarceration toward the treatment of drug addiction as a public health concern, is no longer a "third rail issue."

But the shift is slow in coming, largely because the national criminal justice trend over the past two decades has overwhelmingly favored long, punitive prison sentences over comprehensive strategies toward addressing drug addiction, alcoholism, poverty and mental illness. Beginning with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the modern era of the War on Drugs was ratcheted up by the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, which imposed harsh sentences for the possession of crack cocaine. Parole was essentially abolished for drug offenders in federal prisoners—and then made difficult (if not impossible) for many state prisoners. In the years to follow, many states followed suit with intensified mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, and the jingoistic "three-strikes-you're-out legislation," sealing the fate of hundreds of thousands of men and women behind bars.

The results of this intensification of the drug war have been dramatic and devastating. With two million Americans doing time behind bars, our country now imprisons roughly 500,000 men and women on drug-related charges, at an annual cost of $9.4 billion.

Undeniable Disparities

Of the men and women serving more than one year in state prisons for drug-related offenses in 2001, over three-quarters were people of color. Regardless of the fact that, numerically speaking, five times as many Euro-Americans use drugs in the U.S. as African Americans (for more on this subject, see Tim Wise's article in this issue, "Affirmative Inaction"), a host of practices in law enforcement and the criminal justice system have led to glaring disparities in incarceration rates.

Indeed, racial profiling, buy-and-bust undercover operations, and specially-funded gang task forces have all but guaranteed higher arrest rates within communities of color. These policies and procedures have then, in turn, been exacerbated by overzealous city prosecutors and judges who have little or no wiggle room in meting out mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.

African Americans are, by and far, the most overrepresented ethnic group in the prison system: at just 12.3% of the national population, African Americans made up 58% of the state prison population in 2000 doing time for drug-related offenses. Euro-Americans, by comparison, constitute 75% of the national population, but make up 23% of men and women doing time for drug-related crimes in state prisons.
"For young Black men born in 1966, they are more likely to have gone to prison than to have graduated from a four-year college," says Professor Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. "Prison is now as common as any other life event."

The government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that fully ten percent of African American men nationwide between the ages of 25-29 were in prison in 2001. And although men still far outnumber women in state and federal prisons (at 93.4% versus 6.6%), African American women now represent the single fastest growing segment of the prison population.

According to Human Rights Watch's Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, African Americans in seven states actually account for between 80 and 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges. The extreme end of the racial disparity continuum is represented by states like Illinois, where African American men are sent to prison on drug charges at 57 times the rate of Euro-American men.

The extent to which African Americans are incarcerated has led to a political disenfranchisement unparalleled since the Jim Crow era: today, almost 1.4 million African American men have been temporarily or permanently stripped of the right to vote because of a felony conviction.

Latinos are similarly over-represented behind bars, particularly in the federal prison system. In 1999, almost half of men and women charged with a federal drug offense were Latino, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 30% were African American, while 25% were Euro-American. From 1985 to 1995, the presence of Latinos in prisons in the U.S. grew faster than any other ethnic group—by 219%.
While the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not track the proportions of Native Americans in prison, the rise in these populations has been documented by correctional departments in such states as New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Washington and California. Notably, the percentage of Asian-Americans in the federal prison population increased fourfold from 1980 to 1999.

"The 'drug warriors' know perfectly well who they're after: African Americans, Latinos, Asian 'gang members,' and, increasingly, poor European Americans," says Ko.

Ruined Lives

The drug war arrest and sentencing trends in communities of color have not been limited to adults. Youth of color convicted of drug-related offenses are being sent to juvenile detention centers—and even to adult prisons in states like New Mexico and Arizona—at rates that far surpass those of their Euro-American counterparts.

A report released this past July by Building Blocks for Youth, for instance, revealed that the average incarceration rate for Latino youth is now 13 times the rate of Euro-American youth. Between 1983 and 1991, the percentage of Latino youth in public detention facilities increased by 84%, compared with an 8% increase for Euro-American youth.

Because most juvenile detention facilities are geared toward the notion of punishment rather than rehabilitation, youth emerge from the system undereducated and emotionally ill equipped to deal with the pressures and economic demands of life in the free world. In this sense, many youth of color make a quick transition from juvenile detention facilities to adult prisons, where their age, size and inexperience often makes them the target of physical and sexual abuse.

Tellingly, two-thirds of state prisoners have less than a high school education and one-third were unemployed at the time of their arrest.

Professor Western, who has studied the impact and cycle of joblessness and incarceration on the lives of African American men, notes that ex-offenders tend to do "poorly on the outside."

Employers, he points out, are very reluctant to hire people with criminal backgrounds. And the ex-offender pool among African American men, adds Western, is "is enormous and will only continue to exacerbate wage inequality."

In 2001, roughly 400,000 men and women, most of who were people of color, were released from prison or jail. And year after year, the same recidivism trends play out. With limited employment and housing resources, roughly two-thirds of people released from incarceration nationwide are rearrested within three years. Most of the arrests take place within the first six months after release.

The reason for high recidivism rates among all former prisoners—and particularly drug offenders—has everything to do with the host of problems that they face in trying to reintegrate into society. Once released, prisoners are often sicker, angrier, and more alienated from their communities. Outside of 12-step peer groups, drug treatment services and programs are increasingly scarce in most prisons in the U.S. Under the best of circumstances, ex-offenders are often confronted with the reality that their old habits, coping mechanisms and temptations hold an enormous amount of power over their lives, particularly when even the lowest-paying jobs prove difficult to obtain with a prison record.

Ex-felons convicted of drug offenses also promptly lose their eligibility for federal assistance for both higher education and public housing. (To worsen matters, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that even innocent family members of people who used drugs can be evicted from public housing, regardless of whether they had knowledge of such drug use.)

And because of a hastily tacked-on amendment to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, both food stamps and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) are now denied to most men and women convicted of drug felonies in the U.S.

"The War on Drugs has really been a war on the poor. Rather than supporting those who are vulnerable, we are punishing them and making it even more difficult for them to participate in a very competitive society," says Dan Merkle, co-chair of the Race and Class Disparity Task Force for the Seattle/King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project.

Nothing about the nation's drug war strategy, adds Ko, indicates a genuine desire to help people battle serious drug problems, particularly in light of consistent cuts in state and federal funding for drug treatment.

"Treatment, harm reduction, education, and regulation are the answers to self-destructive drug use and the drug market," Ko says emphatically. "But our current drug policy depends on prison, deprivation of voting rights, ineligibility for subsistence level food and housing assistance, and loss of eligibility for educational loans, which only compound the misery that often is at the root of compulsive drug use."

[hooligan]

Of the men and women serving more than one year in state prisons for drug-related offenses in 2001, over three-quarters were people of color. Regardless of the fact that, numerically speaking, five times as many Euro-Americans use drugs in the U.S. as African Americans (for more on this subject, see Tim Wise's article in this issue, "Affirmative Inaction"), a host of practices in law enforcement and the criminal justice system have led to glaring disparities in incarceration rates.

Indeed, racial profiling, buy-and-bust undercover operations, and specially-funded gang task forces have all but guaranteed higher arrest rates within communities of color. These policies and procedures have then, in turn, been exacerbated by overzealous city prosecutors and judges who have little or no wiggle room in meting out mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.

According to Human Rights Watch's Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, African Americans in seven states actually account for between 80 and 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges. The extreme end of the racial disparity continuum is represented by states like Illinois, where African American men are sent to prison on drug charges at 57 times the rate of Euro-American men.

"The 'drug warriors' know perfectly well who they're after: African Americans, Latinos, Asian 'gang members,' and, increasingly, poor European Americans," says Ko.


I was going to make a joke about Affirmative Action, but since this is all pretty sobering I'm shutting up. I don't think that the criminal justice system is effective at all because, like education, in order for us to address these root inequalities that create these situations we must dismantle so much of our society.

[Marshall Law]

Bump for the evening crowd.


I responded to this post with these statistics on the drug war which are an example of our apartheid-like criminal justice system:

Whites are 76% of current drug users, while blacks are 13.5% and Latino/as are 9.2% of current drug users. Combined, these people of color comprise less than 23% of all drug users, but over the past several years, have come to represent 90% of all persons sent to jail or prison for a drug possession charge.

Here is another article with similar statistics:



The Color of the Drug War

by Silja J.A. Talvi | 08.24.02

The drug war is a proxy for racism, says Andy Ko, Project Director of ACLU-Washington's Drug Policy Reform Project. "Most modern politicians wouldn't dream of explicitly advocating that society persecute or enslave poor people or members of minority communities. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of the 'get-tough-on-crime' drug war policies of the past few decades."

Ten years ago, perspectives such as these might still have been viewed as exaggerated, rhetorical stabs at trying to reverse the trend of skyrocketing U.S. incarceration rates.

But today, civil liberties attorneys like Ko are being joined by what amounts to a nationwide chorus of drug war dissenters.

"It's impossible, in the [sociohistorical] context that we're living in now, to think about civil and human rights without looking at the impact of the War on Drugs," says Sharda Sekaran, Associate Director of Public Policy and Community Outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance in New York. "We now have the vantage point from which to examine the impact of decades of failed drug policies on the nation's most vulnerable communities."

A Growing Movement

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), the nation's leading organization promoting alternatives to the War on Drugs, is gearing up for a national conference focusing on the impact of punitive drug policies on communities of color

"Breaking the Chains: People of Color and the War on Drugs" plans to bring hundreds of religious leaders, civil rights advocates, addiction treatment specialists, musicians and elected officials to downtown Los Angeles from September 26th-28th to discuss what the organization has unabashedly referred to as America's "apartheid-like" criminal justice system.

The conference hopes to build on the momentum generated in August 2001, when an ad-hoc group of more than 100 celebrities, politicians, religious leaders and drug policy reform activists (including Danny Glover, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, NAACP Chair Julian Bond and former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders) sent a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urging recognition of the War on Drugs as a "de facto form of racism." Representatives of the group then took their message to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, to generate discussion and awareness about the disproportionate arrest and sentencing of low-income minorities on drug-related charges in the U.S.

The time is right for the Los Angeles conference, says DPA's Sekaran, because the inequities are now "glaringly obvious." Citizen-supported initiatives favoring treatment over incarceration in states including New Mexico, Arizona, California and Washington have convinced some politicians that a shift away from incarceration toward the treatment of drug addiction as a public health concern, is no longer a "third rail issue."

But the shift is slow in coming, largely because the national criminal justice trend over the past two decades has overwhelmingly favored long, punitive prison sentences over comprehensive strategies toward addressing drug addiction, alcoholism, poverty and mental illness. Beginning with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the modern era of the War on Drugs was ratcheted up by the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, which imposed harsh sentences for the possession of crack cocaine. Parole was essentially abolished for drug offenders in federal prisoners—and then made difficult (if not impossible) for many state prisoners. In the years to follow, many states followed suit with intensified mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, and the jingoistic "three-strikes-you're-out legislation," sealing the fate of hundreds of thousands of men and women behind bars.

The results of this intensification of the drug war have been dramatic and devastating. With two million Americans doing time behind bars, our country now imprisons roughly 500,000 men and women on drug-related charges, at an annual cost of $9.4 billion.

Undeniable Disparities

Of the men and women serving more than one year in state prisons for drug-related offenses in 2001, over three-quarters were people of color. Regardless of the fact that, numerically speaking, five times as many Euro-Americans use drugs in the U.S. as African Americans (for more on this subject, see Tim Wise's article in this issue, "Affirmative Inaction"), a host of practices in law enforcement and the criminal justice system have led to glaring disparities in incarceration rates.

Indeed, racial profiling, buy-and-bust undercover operations, and specially-funded gang task forces have all but guaranteed higher arrest rates within communities of color. These policies and procedures have then, in turn, been exacerbated by overzealous city prosecutors and judges who have little or no wiggle room in meting out mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.

African Americans are, by and far, the most overrepresented ethnic group in the prison system: at just 12.3% of the national population, African Americans made up 58% of the state prison population in 2000 doing time for drug-related offenses. Euro-Americans, by comparison, constitute 75% of the national population, but make up 23% of men and women doing time for drug-related crimes in state prisons.
"For young Black men born in 1966, they are more likely to have gone to prison than to have graduated from a four-year college," says Professor Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. "Prison is now as common as any other life event."

The government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that fully ten percent of African American men nationwide between the ages of 25-29 were in prison in 2001. And although men still far outnumber women in state and federal prisons (at 93.4% versus 6.6%), African American women now represent the single fastest growing segment of the prison population.

According to Human Rights Watch's Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, African Americans in seven states actually account for between 80 and 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges. The extreme end of the racial disparity continuum is represented by states like Illinois, where African American men are sent to prison on drug charges at 57 times the rate of Euro-American men.

The extent to which African Americans are incarcerated has led to a political disenfranchisement unparalleled since the Jim Crow era: today, almost 1.4 million African American men have been temporarily or permanently stripped of the right to vote because of a felony conviction.

Latinos are similarly over-represented behind bars, particularly in the federal prison system. In 1999, almost half of men and women charged with a federal drug offense were Latino, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 30% were African American, while 25% were Euro-American. From 1985 to 1995, the presence of Latinos in prisons in the U.S. grew faster than any other ethnic group—by 219%.
While the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not track the proportions of Native Americans in prison, the rise in these populations has been documented by correctional departments in such states as New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Washington and California. Notably, the percentage of Asian-Americans in the federal prison population increased fourfold from 1980 to 1999.

"The 'drug warriors' know perfectly well who they're after: African Americans, Latinos, Asian 'gang members,' and, increasingly, poor European Americans," says Ko.

Ruined Lives

The drug war arrest and sentencing trends in communities of color have not been limited to adults. Youth of color convicted of drug-related offenses are being sent to juvenile detention centers—and even to adult prisons in states like New Mexico and Arizona—at rates that far surpass those of their Euro-American counterparts.

A report released this past July by Building Blocks for Youth, for instance, revealed that the average incarceration rate for Latino youth is now 13 times the rate of Euro-American youth. Between 1983 and 1991, the percentage of Latino youth in public detention facilities increased by 84%, compared with an 8% increase for Euro-American youth.

Because most juvenile detention facilities are geared toward the notion of punishment rather than rehabilitation, youth emerge from the system undereducated and emotionally ill equipped to deal with the pressures and economic demands of life in the free world. In this sense, many youth of color make a quick transition from juvenile detention facilities to adult prisons, where their age, size and inexperience often makes them the target of physical and sexual abuse.

Tellingly, two-thirds of state prisoners have less than a high school education and one-third were unemployed at the time of their arrest.

Professor Western, who has studied the impact and cycle of joblessness and incarceration on the lives of African American men, notes that ex-offenders tend to do "poorly on the outside."

Employers, he points out, are very reluctant to hire people with criminal backgrounds. And the ex-offender pool among African American men, adds Western, is "is enormous and will only continue to exacerbate wage inequality."

In 2001, roughly 400,000 men and women, most of who were people of color, were released from prison or jail. And year after year, the same recidivism trends play out. With limited employment and housing resources, roughly two-thirds of people released from incarceration nationwide are rearrested within three years. Most of the arrests take place within the first six months after release.

The reason for high recidivism rates among all former prisoners—and particularly drug offenders—has everything to do with the host of problems that they face in trying to reintegrate into society. Once released, prisoners are often sicker, angrier, and more alienated from their communities. Outside of 12-step peer groups, drug treatment services and programs are increasingly scarce in most prisons in the U.S. Under the best of circumstances, ex-offenders are often confronted with the reality that their old habits, coping mechanisms and temptations hold an enormous amount of power over their lives, particularly when even the lowest-paying jobs prove difficult to obtain with a prison record.

Ex-felons convicted of drug offenses also promptly lose their eligibility for federal assistance for both higher education and public housing. (To worsen matters, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that even innocent family members of people who used drugs can be evicted from public housing, regardless of whether they had knowledge of such drug use.)

And because of a hastily tacked-on amendment to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, both food stamps and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) are now denied to most men and women convicted of drug felonies in the U.S.

"The War on Drugs has really been a war on the poor. Rather than supporting those who are vulnerable, we are punishing them and making it even more difficult for them to participate in a very competitive society," says Dan Merkle, co-chair of the Race and Class Disparity Task Force for the Seattle/King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project.

Nothing about the nation's drug war strategy, adds Ko, indicates a genuine desire to help people battle serious drug problems, particularly in light of consistent cuts in state and federal funding for drug treatment.

"Treatment, harm reduction, education, and regulation are the answers to self-destructive drug use and the drug market," Ko says emphatically. "But our current drug policy depends on prison, deprivation of voting rights, ineligibility for subsistence level food and housing assistance, and loss of eligibility for educational loans, which only compound the misery that often is at the root of compulsive drug use."

thanx..very interesting read..

check this out..

VII. RACIALLY DISPROPORTIONATE DRUG ARRESTS
The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.72 Contrary to public belief, the higher arrest rates of black drug offenders do not reflect higher rates of drug law violations. Whites, in fact, commit more drug crimes than blacks. But the war on drugs has been waged in ways that have had the foreseeable consequence of disproportionately targeting black drug offenders.
Drug Arrests

The war on drugs precipitated soaring arrests of drug offenders and increasing racial disproportions among the arrestees. Blacks had long been arrested for drug offenses at higher rates than whites. Throughout the 1970s, for example, blacks were approximately twice as likely as whites to be arrested for drug-related offenses. By 1988, however, with national anti-drug efforts in full force, blacks were arrested on drug charges at five times the rate of whites.73 Nationwide, blacks constituted 37 percent of all drug arrestees;74 in large urban areas, blacks constituted 53 percent of all drug arrestees.75

Even greater disparities in drug offender arrest rates have been documented in individual states. For example, Human Rights Watch's analysis of drug arrests by race in the state of Georgia for the years 1990-1995 revealed that, relative to their share of the population, blacks were arrested for cocaine offenses at seventeen times the rate of whites.76 In Minnesota, drug arrests of blacks grew 500 percent during the 1980s, compared with 22 percent for whites.77 In North Carolina, between 1984 and 1989, minority arrests for drugs increased 183 percent compared to a 36 percent increase in white drug arrests.78

Drug Law Violations by Blacks and Whites

The marked racial disparities in drug arrests did not reflect racial differences in violations of drug laws prohibiting possession and sale of illicit drugs. Statistical as well as anecdotal evidence indicate drug possession and drug selling cut across all racial, socio-economic and geographic lines. Yet because drug law enforcement resources have been concentrated in low-income, predominantly minority urban areas, drug offending whites have been disproportionately free from arrest compared to blacks.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calculates drug use trends from data gathered through the federal National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA).79 In a report based on NHSDA data for 1991, 1992, and 1993, SAMHSA estimated that 3.1 percent of non-Hispanic blacks and 2.4 percent of non-Hispanic whites over the age of 12 had used cocaine in the past year. Because there are far more whites than blacks in the national population, these use rates translate into 3,727,680 non-Hispanic whites who had used cocaine compared to 720,130 non-Hispanic blacks.80 That is, there were five times as many non-Hispanic whites as blacks who were cocaine users.

According to the most recent NHSDA survey, in 1998 there were an estimated 9.9 million whites (72 percent of all users) and 2.0 million blacks (15 percent) who were current illicit drug users in 1998.81 There were almost five times as many current white marijuana users as black and four times as many white cocaine users. Almost three times as many whites had ever used crack as blacks. Among those who had used crack at least once in the past year, 462,000 were white and 324,000 were black.82 Only among current crack users did the number of blacks exceed the number of whites -- and this was a change from previous years in which the number of current white crack users had exceeded the number of black users (Table 17).83 SAMHSA also estimated that in 1998 there were 4,934,000 whites who used marijuana on 51 or more days in the past year, compared to 1,102,000 blacks, and 321,000 whites who had used cocaine on 51 or more days in the past year compared to 171,999 blacks84

The comparison of racial proportions of drug users and drug arrests in the period 1979 to 1998 reveals a markedly higher arrest rate of black drug offenders compared to both whites and to the black proportion of the drug using population (Table 18). The percentage of current drug users who were black and white did not vary significantly in this twenty-year period. Among those arrested on drug charges, however, the percentage of blacks rose markedly, and the percentage of whites decreased correspondingly. For each year, the percentage of black drug arrests was at least double the percentage of blacks among current drug users. Whites, conversely, were under-arrested; that is, they constituted a smaller percent of drug arrests than they did of drug users.

There are no comparable annual statistics on the estimated number and race of drug sellers nationwide. Nevertheless, such data as exists indicates whites constitute a far greater share of the drug selling population than of the population arrested for drug selling. For example, during the period 1991-1993, SAMHSA included questions about drug selling in the annual NHSDA surveys. Although the responses are best seen as a rough approximation of drug selling activity, they are nonetheless highly suggestive.85 On average over the three yearperiod, blacks were 16 percent of admitted sellers and whites were 82 percent. According to research on patterns of drug purchase and use in selected major cities, drug users reported that their main drug sources were sellers of the same racial or ethnic background as they were.86 A large study conducted in the Miami, Florida metropolitan area of 699 cocaine users (powder and crack) revealed that over 96 percent of the users in each ethnic/racial category were involved in street-level drug dealing, which again would suggest a racial profile of sellers that is comparable to that of users.87 General Barry McCaffrey has stated that drug transactions between youth are generally intra-racial, that is, youth tend to buy from sellers of the same race.88 ONDCP's former periodic report on drug trends, Pulse Check, also indicated a high frequency of intra-racial drug transactions, that is, that whites tended to buy from white sellers and minorities from minority sellers.89

Origins of Racially Disproportionate Arrests

To some extent, racial disproportions in drug arrests reflect demographic factors. Drug law enforcement is concentrated in large urban areas. Illicit drug use is also higher in large metropolitan areas.90 Since more blacks, proportionately, live in these areas than whites, black drug offenders are at greater risk of arrest than white offenders.91 But within metropolitan areas, politics and law enforcement priorities have determined how drug arrests would be distributed.

Within urban areas, the "major fronts" in the drug wars have been low income minority neighborhoods. With the spread of crack in the early 1980s, these neighborhoods suffered from the disorder, nuisance, and assaults on the quality of life that accompanied increased drug dealing on the streets as well as the crime and violence that accompanied the development of crack distribution systems. Dismayed residents in those neighborhoods pressed the police and public officials to "do something." But the residents' response was more than matched by the censure, outrage, and concern from outsiders that was fanned by incessant and frequently sensationalist media stories about crack, and by politicians seeking electoral advantage by being "tough on crime."92

Although crack was the least used of all illicit drugs in the U.S., and although more whites used illicit drugs than blacks (see Table 17, above), the "war on drugs" has been targeted most notoriously at the possession and sale of crack cocaine by blacks. Crack cocaine in black neighborhoods became a lightning rod for a complicated and deep-rooted set of racial, class, political, social, and moral dynamics.93 To the extent that the white majority in the U.S. identified both crime and drugs with the "dangerous classes" -- i.e., poor urban blacks -- it was easier to endorse, or at least acquiesce in, punitive penal policies that might have been rejected if members of their own families and communities were being sent to prison at comparable rates.94

Tactical considerations also encouraged the concentration of anti-drug resources in disadvantaged minority neighborhoods and the consequent disproportionate number of black drug offender arrests. Police departments point to the number of arrests as a measure of effectiveness. The circumstances of life and the public nature of drug transactions in low income urban neighborhoods make arrests far easier there than in other neighborhoods.95 In poor black neighborhoods, drug transactions are more likely to be conducted on the streets, in public, and between strangers, whereas in white neighborhoods -- working class through upper class -- drugs are more likely to be sold indoors, in bars, clubs, and private homes. "[I]n poor urban minority neighborhoods, it is easier for undercover narcotics officers to penetrate networks of friends and acquaintances than in more stable and closely knit working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. The stranger buying drugs on the urban street corner or in an alley, or overcoming local suspicions by hanging around for a few days and then buying drugs, was commonplace. Police undercover operations can succeed [in working and middle-class neighborhoods] but they take longer, cost more, and are less likely to succeed."96

Racial profiling -- the police practice of stopping, questioning, and searching potential criminal suspects in vehicles or on the street based solely on their racial appearance -- has also contributed to racially disproportionate drug arrests, although there are no reliable estimates of the number. In many locales, black drivers are disproportionately stopped for minor traffic offenses and then searched.97 Similarly, blacks and other minorities have been disproportionately targeted in "stop and frisk" operations in which police temporarily detain, question, and pat down pedestrians suspected of criminal activity. In New York City, for example, between January 1998 and March 1999, police officers made far more stop and frisks in minority neighborhoods; even within neighborhoods with primarily white populations, the majority of the people stopped were black or Hispanic.98

Other factors have also been important in increasing the relative rate at which black drug offenders are arrested compared to whites. For example, low income purchasers of cocaine buy the drug in the cheap form of single or several hits of crack. They must engage in far more illegal transactions to satisfy their desire for drugs than middle or upper class consumers of powder cocaine who have the resources to buy larger and longer lasting supplies. The greater frequency of purchases and sales may well affect susceptibility to arrest. 99

VIII. WOMEN, RACE, DRUGS AND IMPRISONMENT

Although women accounted for only 6.5 percent of the total state and federal prison population at midyear 1999,100 the rate of incarceration of women has been growing twice as fast as that of men over the last two decades.101 Between 1990 and 1997, the female incarceration rate nearly doubled, increasing from 31 to 57 women in prison per 100,000 female residents.102 At midyear 1999 there were 87,199 women under the jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities.103

Racial disparities among incarcerated women are pronounced: black women were more than eight times as likely as white to be in prison in 1997.104 The incarceration rates for both black and white women have increased by approximately two-thirds since 1990.105

The war on drugs is responsible for the dramatic rise in the absolute number and rate of women incarcerated and, indeed, has had a greater proportionate impact on women than men. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of women serving time in prison for drug offenses nearly doubled, compared to a 48 percent increase in the number of men in prison for drug offenses.106

Between 1986 and 1996, the number of women incarcerated on drug charges rose by 888 percent, compared to a rise of 129 percent for non-drug offenses.107 In 1979, twelve percent of the women in state prison had been convicted of drug charges; by 1997, that figure had risen to 34.4 percent.108 Fifty-six percent of their convictions were for trafficking offenses and 44 percent were for possession.

Drug offenses accounted for more than two in five women admitted to state prisons nationwide (Table 19). The three states with the highest percentages of women sent to prison on drug charges were New York (68 percent), Washington (54 percent), and New Jersey (49 percent).

As with men, the impact of the war on drugs falls disproportionately on black women. Nationwide, 42.2 percent of all black women and 36.1 percent of white women admitted to prison in 1996 were convicted of drug offenses. Even in the states with the lowest percentages of female drug offender admissions, the figure is more than one in five (with the exception of Iowa). Black women constitute 6.3 percent of the national adult population and 7 percent of prison drug admissions; white women constitute 43.2 percent of the national adult population but only 5.4 percent of drug admissions. Black female drug offenders constituted a greater percentage of total admissions than white female drug offenders in half of the states that reported data to the NCRP (Figure 9).
72 Racial disparities in drug arrests account for the preponderance, but not all, of the racial disproportionality in incarcerated drug offenders. Indeed, Alfred Blumstein has found that the rate of imprisonment for drug offenses "is the most poorly correlated to the rate of arrests of all crime types." Based on 1991 data he concluded that blacks comprised 57.7 percent of the prisoners for drug offenses but only 40.4 percent of the arrestees for drug offenses, "so that they are overrepresented in prison by forty-three percent compared to arrest." Alfred Blumstein, "Racial Disproportionality of U.S. Prisons Populations Revisited," 64 University of Colorado Law Review 751 (1993). The precise reasons for the substantially different racial proportions among drug offender arrestees and incarcerated drug offenders disparity in arrest versus incarceration on drug offenses have not been established conclusively. The type of drug offenses (possession or sales), the type of drug and the existence of a prior record are all factors that affect sentencing.

73 Tonry, Malign Neglect, p. 111; Blumstein, "Racial Disproportionality." Blacks constituted 26.8 percent of all adult drug arrests in 1980 but 40 percent of those arrested on drug charges in 1990. The black share of drug arrests decreased slightly to 37 percent in 1998. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (DOJ/FBI), Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States, (Washington, D.C.:USGPO, 1980, 1990, and 1998). Juvenile drug arrests followed a similar trend. Black youth comprised 14.5 percent of all drug arrests in 1980; in 1990 they comprised 48.8 percent of drug arrests. Data obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; on file at HRW.

74 U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (DOJ/FBI), Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States, 1998 (Washington, D.C.:USGPO, 1998).

75 BJS, "Felony Defendants", Table 4, p. 5.

76 HRW, Race and Drug Law Enforcement in Georgia.

77 Tonry, Malign Neglect, p. 113.

78 Ibid.

79 The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse is the primary source of data on the prevalence of substance use in the United States. It was sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse from 1974 to 1991. Beginning in October, 1992, responsibility for conducting the NHSDA was moved to the Office of Applied Studies within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The NHDSA is conducted through questionnaires and interviews administered to large national sample, with oversampling in six metropolitan areas. The survey undercounts certain disadvantaged populations, e.g. the homeless, those in institutions, and those not in stable residences.

80 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Prevalence of Substance Use Among Racial and Ethnic Subgroups in the United States 1991-1993, Washington, D.C., 1998.

81 SAMHSA, Summary Findings 1998, p. 13.

82 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), National Household Survey on Drug Abuse: Populations Estimates 1998, Washington, D.C., 1999. Table 5B and D.

83 According to the 1994 survey, for example, 292,200 whites were current users of crack cocaine compared to 161,000 blacks. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Population Estimates for 1994, Washington, D.C., September 1995, Table 5B and D.

84 SAMHSA, Population Estimates 1998, Tables 20 B, 20D, 21B, 21D.

85 Beginning in 1991, SAMHSA asked respondents in the household survey, whether they had sold any illicit drugs during the preceding year. One can assume that under-reporting on illegal conduct may be considerable and that withholding information would be more prevalent with regard to drug selling than drug use. We do not know, however, whether there would be significant differences between blacks and whites in their willingness to acknowledge drug selling. The responses must also be treated with caution because the NHSDA does not survey people living on the streets or in institutions.

86 K. Jack Riley, Crack, Powder Cocaine, and Heroin: Drug Purchase and Use Patterns in Six U.S. Cities, Washington D.C.: National Institute of Justice and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, December 1997.

87 Dorothy Lockwood, Anne E. Pottieger and James A. Inciardi, "Crack Use, Crime by Crack Users, and Ethnicity," in Darnel F. Hawkins, ed., Ethnicity, Race and Crime, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).

88 Patricia Davis and Pierre Thomas, "In Affluent Suburbs, Young Users and Sellers Abound," The Washington Post, December 14, 1997.

89 Office of National Drug Control Policy, Pulse Check: National Trends in Drug Abuse (Washington, D.C. various years). Pulse Check reported on illegal drug use trends based on information obtained form police, ethnographers, and epidemiologists working in the drug field. Publication of Pulse Check ended in the Winter of 1998.

90 According to SAMHSA's surveys, regardless of racial or ethnic subgroup, a relatively high prevalence of illicit drug use is found among individuals who reside in metropolitan areas with populations greater than one million. See SAMHSA, Prevalence of Substance. SAMHSA prepared estimates on drug use in twenty-six states and in twenty-five large metropolitan areas. Their data show that the percentage of population using any illicit substance within the past month in the 1991-1993 period was usually larger for metropolitan areas than for the states in which those areas were located. A high proportion -- generally between one third and one half -- of each state's drug using population was also located in metropolitan areas. In Texas, for example, half of all cocaine users were in four urban areas; in Florida, one third of cocaine users were in two urban areas. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Substance Abuse in States and Metropolitan Areas, Exh. 3.1 , 3.2, 3.3, and 3.5.

91 Only 14 percent of blacks live in non-metropolitan areas compared to 27 percent of whites. SAMHSA, Racial and Ethnic Subgroups. While 44 percent of Americans live in large metropolitan areas, 60 percent of drug possession arrests occur there. Patrick A. Langan, "The Race Disparity in U.S. Drug Arrests," unpublished report on file at HRW. Langan is a senior statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

92 Journalists portrayed crack use and crack-related crime as primarily problems of blacks in inner city neighborhoods. "Magazine photographs show young black American men and women smoking crack in abandoned buildings, minority youth with guns in their jeans, and handfuls of crack." Lockwood, Pottieger, and Inciardi, "Crack Use," p. 212. See also, e.g., Reinerman and Levine, "The Crack Attack."

93 The notorious distinction and heavier sentences mandated in federal law between crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, and the proportionally greater number of blacks prosecuted federally for crack and thus receiving heavier sentences than whites who are primarily prosecuted for powder cocaine offenses, have come to symbolize for many the racially discriminatory nature of the war on drugs. See United States Sentencing Commission, Special Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, 1995 for data on federal prosecution of crack versus powder cocaine offenses. No comparable national data exists on cocaine prosecutions in the ten states whose criminal laws distinguish between powder and crack cocaine.

94 Tonry, Malign Neglect. The country could have, for example, chosen an aggressive public health strategy to counter cocaine use in low income neighborhoods, as it did under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s when faced with a surge in heroin use. See Michael Massing, The Fix (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

95 HRW, Race and Drug Law; Caplow and Simon, "Understanding Prison Policy."

96 Tonry, Malign Neglect, p. 106. See also Blumstein, Racial Disproportionality; Carole Wolff Barnes and Rodney Kingsworth, "Race, Drug, and Criminal Sentencing: Hidden Effects of the Criminal Law," 24 Journal of Criminal Justice 39 (1996).

97 See, e.g. David Harris, "The Stories, The Statistics, and the Law: Why `Driving While Black' Matters," 84 Minnesota L. Rev. 265 (1999); David Harris, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways," An American Civil Liberties Union Special Report, June 1999. Available on-line at www.aclu.org/profiling/report.

98 Ronald H. Weich and Carlos T. Angulo, Justice on Trial: Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System, a report by the Leadership Conference on Civil rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, May, 2000, pp. 4-5, citing "The New York City Police Department's "Stop and Frisk" Practices: A Report to the People of New York from the Office of the Attorney General," December 1999.

99 See Alfred Blumstein, "Youth Violence, Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Industry," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 10 (1995).

100 There were 75,241 women under jurisdiction of state correctional authorities, and 9,186 under federal jurisdiction BJS, "Prisoners in 1998," Table 7, p. 6

101 Marc Mauer, Cathy Potler, and Richard Wolf, Gender and Justice: Women, Drugs, and Sentencing Policy, (Washington D.C.: The Sentencing Project, November 1999). p.1

102 BJS, "Prisoners in 1998," p. 5.

103 BJS, "Inmates at Mid-year 1999."

104 Non-hispanic black women are incarcerated at a rate of 200 per 100,000, compared to the rate of 25 per 100,000 for white non-hispanic women. BJS, "Prisoners in 1998," Table 15.

105 "Prisoners in 1998," Table 12.

106 Ibid., "Prisoners in 1998," p. 11. There were 11,700 more women in state prison in 1997 on drugs charges than in 1990, representing 38% of the 30,600 total increase in the number of female state prisoners in that period.

107 Mauer, Potler, and Wolf, Gender and Justice, p. 2.

108 Lawrence A. Greenfield and Tracy L. Snell, "Women Offenders," Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice (December 1999).
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yet no one who asks why blacks are arrested and jailed so much more than others ever takes any of this into consideration...

but we've digressed enough on this point...

[nola]

There are no comparable annual statistics on the estimated number and race of drug sellers nationwide. Nevertheless, such data as exists indicates whites constitute a far greater share of the drug selling population than of the population arrested for drug selling. For example, during the period 1991-1993, SAMHSA included questions about drug selling in the annual NHSDA surveys. Although the responses are best seen as a rough approximation of drug selling activity, they are nonetheless highly suggestive.85 On average over the three yearperiod, blacks were 16 percent of admitted sellers and whites were 82 percent. According to research on patterns of drug purchase and use in selected major cities, drug users reported that their main drug sources were sellers of the same racial or ethnic background as they were.86 A large study conducted in the Miami, Florida metropolitan area of 699 cocaine users (powder and crack) revealed that over 96 percent of the users in each ethnic/racial category were involved in street-level drug dealing, which again would suggest a racial profile of sellers that is comparable to that of users.87 General Barry McCaffrey has stated that drug transactions between youth are generally intra-racial, that is, youth tend to buy from sellers of the same race.88 ONDCP's former periodic report on drug trends, Pulse Check, also indicated a high frequency of intra-racial drug transactions, that is, that whites tended to buy from white sellers and minorities from minority sellers.89This was interesting to me that the same highly unjust inverse proportion of whites and blacks applies to drug dealing and selling.

[Paradox]

This was interesting to me that the same highly unjust inverse proportion of whites and blacks applies to drug dealing and selling.
I know from first hand experience that career drug dealer white