Timely reminders that racial disparities may persist and grow even as the carceral state begins to shrink

The Marshall Project has this notable new piece about arrest rates during the COVID era under the full headline "Police Arrested Fewer People During Coronavirus Shutdowns — Even Fewer Were White: Racial disparities grew in five cities as arrests fell, according to our new data analysis."  Here are excerpts:

As protesters clash with police across the country, they are venting not only their rage about the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, but more broadly their frustration with decades of racial inequality in the American criminal justice system.

These inequalities persisted during the coronavirus outbreak, a new Marshall Project analysis of arrest data found. Even as crime rates fell while much of the country was ordered to shelter in place, arrest data from five U.S. cities suggests racial disparities worsened in March and April.  Across these cities, arrests of white people dropped 17 percent more than arrests of black people and 21 percent more than Hispanic people.

In March, the New York City Police Department made about 13,000 arrests, a 30-percent drop from the same month a year before. While most people in the city were confined to their homes, the changes in arrest practices did not affect residents of all races equally.  White people experienced the largest decreases in arrests, whereas arrests of black and Hispanic people dropped at a much slower rate.

New York is not an outlier. The Marshall Project’s analysis found that arrests in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Tucson, Arizona, reflected similar patterns.  As the total number of arrests plummeted through March and April, they didn't drop equally across the board. Arrests of white people decreased far more than the arrests of black and Hispanic people. Though they were much fewer to begin with, arrests of Asians, Native Americans and people of other backgrounds declined faster than arrests of white people.

These disparities in arrests took place during the same time period when some police departments came under fire for how they enforce social distancing orders. In New York City, more than 80 percent of people arrested for violating those orders were black. In major cities across Ohio, black residents were more than four times as likely to be charged with violating stay-at-home orders than their white peers. 

In Los Angeles, New York and Tucson, three cities that break down arrests by the severity of the alleged offense, The Marshall Project found that with each racial and ethnic group, misdemeanor arrests plummeted during the early weeks of the pandemic, while felony arrests, for the most severe crimes, declined slightly.  For example, from February to March, the Los Angeles Police Department made 1,000 fewer arrests for misdemeanor charges, such as driving under the influence or traffic violations. Meanwhile, arrests for felony charges, like aggravated assault and rape, dropped by 100.

These COVID-era data remind me of the data we often now see on marijuana-related arrests in the wake of legalization or decriminalization, where the total number of arrests decline (often significantly) but with racial disparities persisting or even growing.  Here are just a few recent studies on this topic via my coverage at my Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform blog:

• New research on racial disparities in traffic stops and searches highlights how marijuana reform reduces searches (but not racial disparities)
• "The heterogeneous effect of marijuana decriminalization policy on arrest rates in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2009–2018"
• Persistently discouraging news about persistent racial disparities in marijuana enforcement
• Interesting data on marijuana arrests in DC after 2014 legalization initiative

Also worth recalling in this context is the notable reality that a number of US states with relatively smaller prison populations often have the most racially disparate prison populations.  This 2016 Sentencing Project report on the topic detailed that the states with the largest disparities in their prison population between whites and blacks were Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wisconsin.  Notably, all of these states have well below the national average in per-capita prison population.

These numbers do not surprise me because I often notice, in both policies and practices, how disparities and discrimination can find express in the exercise of leniency or mercy.  I see this especially in death penalty administration, when so many different actors in the system (prosecutors, judges, jurors) have formal and/or informal authority to prevent a murderer from being subject to the death penalty.  Disparities can and will result merely not from legal actors being distinctly punitive toward certain defendants, but also from these actors being distinctly willing to act leniently or mercifully toward only certain other defendants.  Other sentencing systems, where prosecutorial charging and bargaining discretion in turn shape judicial sentencing discretion, also surely reflect differential expressions of leniency as well as differential expressions of punitiveness.

I bring all this up not too create cynicism or fatalism about what legal and social change might achieve, but rather to highlight how much work there is to do even as we make progress in reducing the scope and impact of mass criminalization, mass punishment and mass incarceration.  In recent years, I have grown ever more hopeful about the potential, politically and practically, to shrink the carceral state in America.  But the events of this past week provide a critical reminder of our need to keep our eyes on all the prizes that we are aspiring to achieving in this critically important work.