Suspicion Nation Read online

  All the data compiled by the NYPD about their own stops simply confirms what social psychology studies have told us about racial bias: that we are more wary of our African-American neighbors, that we see ordinary matters like pocket bulges, hanging out on street corners, or walking to the deli as suspicious, and that overwhelmingly, our suspicions are wrong. The statistics also establish that police focus their attention on our citizens of color, stopping large numbers of them, looking for crimes. Although the African Americans stopped were less likely to be carrying drugs or contraband, when greater numbers of them are frisked, a greater number of apprehended black criminals will result. And thus the perception of the black criminal is self-perpetuating and is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Does police data get us any closer to answering the question as to whether African Americans commit more crimes than whites? Not really. What it does underscore is that race-based policing is the norm—that darker-skinned people are more likely to be seen as suspicious by police, and those suspicions are nearly always wrong. When one group is disproportionately watched and stopped, more of that group will be fed into the criminal justice system. Because the inputs are distorted, we can’t rely on arrest and incarceration numbers to determine who the criminals are. Garbage in, garbage out.

  The best we can do with current data is to look at self-reports, where people acknowledge what behavior they’ve engaged in. As we’ve seen, self-reports have limited value, at least when it comes to discussing racial bias. And even on an anonymous survey, we can’t expect subjects to own up to major crimes like burglary or murder. But a surprising number of people will cop to using illegal narcotics, owning prohibited guns, or street fighting. And there’s no reason to believe that one race would tend to lie on self-reports any more than another, so we can use this data in comparing white and black criminality.

  When asked about drug use, whites and blacks report consuming illegal narcotics at roughly the same rates, though as we’ve seen, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at four times the rate of whites. In the area of weapon possession, whites report carrying illegal guns more frequently than blacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey. This is consistent with what NYPD cops found in their stops and frisks: more white New Yorkers carried unlawful firearms. Yet African-American youth are arrested for weapons offenses at a rate more than twice that of whites (69 per 100,000, versus 30 per 100,000).

  What about violent crime? African-American youth report183 being in a physical fight at a similar rate to white youth, though blacks are arrested for aggravated assault, a major felony, at a rate nearly three times that of whites (137 per 100,000, versus 48 per 100,000).

  Self-reporting reveals no particular association between criminality and African Americans at a level greater than whites. Those numbers, the only ones available that remove police racial profiling and disproportionate inner-city policing from the equation, do not provide any support for the black-as-criminal stereotype.

  We also know that offenders tend to prey on people like themselves. That is, most crimes are crimes of opportunity, committed in one’s own neighborhood. Because our country remains residentially segregated, most of the time, criminals target people of their own race. We hear a fair amount about black-on-black crime, as we should, because its victims cry out for justice. Overwhelmingly, black criminals rape, rob, and kill black victims. Yet we hear little about its mirror image, equally prevalent white-on-white crime. White offenders commonly prey on other whites. In a thirty-year study, 86 percent184 of white murder victims were killed by other whites. Ninety-four percent185 of African-American murder victims lost their lives at the hands of other African Americans.

  Is fear of black criminality reasonable? If you play the odds and are white, no. Whites are far more likely to be victimized by other whites. And overall, whites are the majority of criminals and convicts.186 This remains true even as the number of white Americans relative to the rest of the population decreases.

  Cross-racial crimes are relatively rare. In 2011, for example, in our country of 314 million people,187 whites were killed by blacks 448 times,188 according to FBI statistics (recognizing the limitations of these statistics discussed above). Whites were killed by whites 2,630 times. Seventy-eight percent of the population is white (including white Hispanics), for a total of 244,920,000 white Americans. In other words, a white person has a one in 547,000 chance of being killed by an African American. The odds are nearly six times higher that a white American will be killed by a white person.

  Put another way, Zimmerman was about as likely to be hit by lightning when he got out of his car that winter evening as he was to be killed by Trayvon. (Zimmerman’s odds of being hit by lightning in Florida were one in 614,549—odds that rose as he exited his car into that rainy February night.)189

  On the other hand, if you are African-American and live in a low-income, segregated neighborhood, fear of black crime is reasonable, but I doubt you need me to tell you that. As has always been the case, violent crimes occur more often in poor neighborhoods, and so many black Americans, as we’ve seen, remain locked in a cycle of poverty, in inner cities where crime is high relative to wealthier residential areas. Economically disadvantaged people have fewer options and more desperation, and they commit more street crime, nearly always against their poor neighbors. This is an issue of socioeconomic class, not race. In a study190 of over 9000 American neighborhoods in sixty-four metropolitan areas, Ohio State researchers found that poverty, not race, breeds violent crime. Whites in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods committed crime at the same rates as African Americans in similar poor communities. (The researchers called their book Divergent Social Worlds, lamenting how difficult it could be to find statistically significant numbers of wealthy majority-black neighborhoods or economically disadvantaged white areas so that they could compare apples to apples. “The divergence is still tremendous,” they said.)

  FINALLY, A WORD about fear. To answer the question, “Should we fear black criminality?” let’s take a moment to focus less on the race

  question and more on the fear factor. Our anxieties about crime in general are grossly distorted. Despite all the scary local news stories (“If it bleeds, it leads”), crime has dropped significantly in the last generation. The number of violent offenses has fallen by 32 percent191 since 1990 across America as a whole. In our major cities, it has plummeted a whopping 64 percent. A debate rages as to why: from the legalization of abortion, to less lead in paint, to more sobriety among young people, to more cops on the streets. For whatever reasons, crime is now down192 to 1960s levels, and in many places, it’s still falling. As George Zimmerman and many others like him were preoccupied with crime, it continued to drop nationwide, most notably in the South,193 where Zimmerman lived.

  Our anxiety about crime is much like our other irrational fears, based more on emotion than reason. If what we fear most is death, murder isn’t even in the top ten causes of death for Americans. According to the CDC,194 in order of lethality, Americans died from these top killers in 2010, the most recent year, as of this writing, for which full data was available:

  1.Heart disease: 597,689

  2.Cancer: 574,743

  3.Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 138,080

  4.Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 129,476

  5.Accidents (unintentional injuries): 120,859

  6.Alzheimer’s disease: 83,494

  7.Diabetes: 69,071

  8.Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,476

  9.Influenza and Pneumonia: 50,097

  10.Intentional self-harm (suicide): 38,364

  Since heart disease tops the list, if you want to fear the most prolific killer among us, fear cheeseburgers. Consider number 5. Most accidents occur at home. You’re better off checking for uneven and slippery surfaces inside your home than worrying about threats on the outside. And consider number 10 on the list. You are more li
kely to die at your own hand than be killed by an assailant of any race. Or number 9: getting a flu shot is a better use of your time than worrying about your neighbors.

  Our biggest worries bear little relationship to actual danger. In our prosperous, democratic country, bordered by oceans on the east and west and friendly neighbors to the north and south, we are a nation dominated by fear. Anxiety disorders195 are America’s number one mental health problem, and we consume more psychiatric medications for our uneasiness than any other nation on earth. A series of books from Seth Mnookin’s The Panic Virus to Michael Specter’s Denialism and Chris Mooney’s Unscientific America decries America’s irrational terrors. Parents worry that a stranger will abduct and murder their child, for example, an extraordinarily rare event, while accidents, cancer, and genetic conditions are the top causes of death196 for children aged one to fourteen. (As author Lenore Skenazy points out, if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, you’d have to leave her outside unattended for about 750,000 years.197) Many of us are frightened by flying, yet we jump in and out of our cars all day, worry free, where we are twenty times more likely to be injured or killed. We feel so irrationally safe behind the wheel of these dangerous vehicles that huge numbers of us cavalierly text while driving, or drive impaired or tired.

  Just as most of us are more comfortable in cars because we live with them daily, most of us are more relaxed with our own race because we live in families and neighborhoods that are dominated by members of them. We want to feel safe and secure and so we don’t like to look at the hard facts that those same people are the most likely to commit crimes against us. A child, for example, is nine times more likely to be molested by a family member than a stranger. A burglary is most likely to be committed by someone who lives in the same neighborhood, and who shares the same skin color, as his or her victim. But fear of the Other, especially fear of the black man as criminal, has such a deep, ingrained history in America that it lives on, irrational as it is for most of us.

  Does the black-as-criminal stereotype reflect reality? The real answer is that with so much racial bias permeating our system, operating cumulatively to produce a bloated population of black inmates that is not representative of the African-American population’s contribution to crime, we can’t know for sure what percent of, say, burglars, are black. (Only 10 percent of burglars are caught.) When black youth are rounded up for drug crimes while whites use marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, and other popular narcotics with relative impunity; when young people of color are watched, stopped, and frisked as a matter of course while whites are not; when black offenders are treated more harshly than whites for the same crimes; when black ex-cons are released into impoverished communities and barred from the necessities of life; we will continue to bear the disgrace of pushing out African Americans not only from schools but from our communities, locking them out of our neighborhoods and into prisons.

  Having said all that, if for some reason you choose to fear crime, though statistically you should fear accidents or diabetes far more, and you are black, then yes, fear black criminals. Similarly, if you elect to walk around with anxiety over being assaulted, though rationally speaking you’d do better concerning yourself with preventing strokes or Alzheimer’s, and you are white, fear your white neighbors. Because we know that most crime is intraracial.

  What makes little sense is for whites to fear blacks. Those anxieties should be relegated to the dustbins of our ignominious history of slavery and overt racism, understood as lingering vestiges of those days. The black-as-criminal stereotype should be seen today not only for its illogic but also for the pain it causes racially profiled young people of color, for the barrage of indignities we heap upon them in response to our irrational fears, for the alienation we are causing to millions of Americans as we eye them with suspicion, set our police upon them, round them up and incarcerate them for minor offenses like marijuana possession that the majority of Americans of all races have committed at some point in our lives. It’s time to call out this deep-seated stereotype for what it is: a toxic lie that stands in the way of our becoming the egalitarian, racially inclusive nation we aspire to be.

  And Now for the Good News

  “The challenge has been to tell what I view as the truth about racism without causing disabling despair.”

  —HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR DERRICK BELL

  THE MOUNTAIN OF evidence establishing the persistence of racial bias in America can lead to despondency, but let’s not allow that, for there is also encouraging news giving us reason for hope. The overwhelming majority198 of whites (75 percent) and blacks (90 percent) believe that the criminal justice system should operate in a race-neutral fashion and favor federal government intervention to ensure that whites and people of color receive equal treatment at the hands of police and the courts.

  The people want fairness.

  It’s not 1930. Our explicit values no longer support racism, but instead favor equality, hands down. The solution is simply to bring our actions, conscious and unconscious, into alignment with our explicit values of nondiscrimination. The happy news is that this is eminently doable.

  Implicit racial biases are in operation everywhere, not just the criminal justice system. In one study,199 hundreds of doctors in Atlanta and Boston were given vignettes featuring black and white patients with the same medical history of coronary artery disease. The physicians reported no explicit preferences for black or white patients (like everyone in these studies, they profess that they are not racist), but their interpretations of the patients presented to them and their recommendations proved otherwise. White patients were more likely to be taken seriously and sent for treatment, and black patients were viewed as less cooperative, even though the doctors were presented with identical behaviors and symptoms. This only replicates many medical studies200 finding that doctors spend more time with white patients, pay more attention to their symptoms, and refer them to specialists and treatment more often.

  But doctors, like most of the rest of us, want to live up to their expressed egalitarian values. And it turns out that when they are made aware of unconscious biases, they are able to change their behavior. Once they learn the disappointing news that they are giving short shrift to their African-American patients, they learn to pause, consider, then override their implicit biases, treating black and white patients fairly.201 With motivated professionals, education leads to better practices in relatively short order.

  Similar work has been done with police officers. Police departments occasionally investigate Racists with a capital R in their ranks, eliminating them when found as the rare bad apples (see, e.g., the odious Mark Fuhrman in the O.J. Simpson murder case, who was caught on tape calling African Americans “niggers” forty-one times and admitting to targeting for arrest black males driving in cars with white women). While that’s a good start, it’s still stuck in the old “you’re either racist or you’re not” mindset. Newer thinking approaches the matter in an entirely different way, essentially conveying this message: “We all want to be fair to everyone regardless of skin color. But most of us would be surprised to learn that we carry around with us hidden racial stereotypes that affect some of our judgments and decisions about people we come into contact with on a daily basis. Even many African Americans harbor some racial biases against their own group. Many well-meaning people do. You’re not a bad person if you, like most Americans, have these implicit racial biases. We want to make you aware of them and then help you do your job in a way that’s fair to people of every color.”

  Police officers can then be trained to intentionally override their implicit biases. The Chicago Police Department, for example, has new recruits respond to mock calls from computer simulations. Most of the rookies initially react to the situations presented to them based on racial and gender stereotypes, focusing more on young men of color, for instance. (Implicit biases about gender, sexual orientation, and age are also present in most of us, according to legions of
studies.) They are then surprised to see how unproductive reliance on those biases was, as the trainer reveals that they missed a woman with a gun and a male sex-crime victim, but they stopped a law-abiding young man of color.202 The message: Well-meaning people—even you!—have implicit biases, and acting on them produces unjust and ineffective results. Awareness is the first step. Multiple follow-up training sessions then teach recruits how to override prejudices and conform their conduct to their values. The result: better policing.

  Diversity in the workforce also minimizes implicit biases, for police officers and the rest of us. Not only do employers with multiracial staff get the benefit of a mix of people from different cultural backgrounds, but when people get to know one another as individuals rather than group members, stereotypes diminish. (This was one of the primary reasons courts used to order schools to desegregate.)

  Jurors, too, can learn about racial biases and be instructed to override them, in a nonthreatening manner. Most jurors in American courtrooms are read overly broad instructions to the effect that they are not to decide cases based on emotions or prejudice. The Zimmerman jury was so instructed. But that is meaningless to most of us who consider ourselves nonracist, fair-minded people. Few think they are deciding a case based on stereotypes to begin with. Thus few panelists even consider that this instruction has anything to do with the racial issues in the case before them.

  U.S. District Court Judge Mark Bennett203 has improved upon this bland language, building on implicit bias research. He educates jurors about implicit racial biases before the trial even begins, during jury selection, and again at the end, just before they go to deliberate. Note how he brings up the subject in such a nonthreatening manner, even including himself in it: