- It’s not that Black people are criminals: It’s that the cops think Black people are criminals: For instance, despite making up only 24 percent of Boston’s population, Black people made up 63 percent of the civilians who were interrogated, stopped, frisked or searched by the BPD between 2007 and 2010. According to the researchers, this suggests “that the disparity in searches was more consistent with racial bias than with differences in criminal conduct.”
- Black suspects don’t get bail: The average bail is slightly higher in cases involving Black defendants. Furthermore, more Black and Latinx defendants are detained without bail as compared to white defendants.
- Black people are charged with higher offenses: But curiously, when they get to court, Black defendants are convicted of charges roughly equal in seriousness to their White counterparts despite facing more serious initial charges.
- There are actually two separate systems: The study notes that prosecutors are more likely to exercise their discretion to send Black and Latinx people “to Superior Court where the available sentences are longer.”
- And separate sentences: If you’re Black and charged with crimes carrying a mandatory minimum, you are substantially more likely to be incarcerated and receive a longer sentence.
- Especially if they find drugs or guns on you: Black and Latinx people charged with drug offenses and weapons offenses are more likely to be incarcerated and receive longer incarceration sentences than white people charged with similar offenses
- Sentencing length: The average Black person’s sentence is 168 days longer than a sentence for a white person. Even when the researchers controlled for criminal history, jurisdiction, and neighborhood, they concluded: “[R]acial disparities in sentence length cannot solely be explained by the contextual factors that we consider and permeate the entire criminal justice process.”
The researchers even looked at poverty rates, the family structures of convicted felons and the neighborhoods they lived in. They eventually decided that the only reasonable explanation that explained the disparities was racism.
One of the more interesting parts of the report juxtaposed people who possessed illegal firearms with people arrested for operating a vehicle under the influence (OUI). They reasoned that both acts are
potentially dangerous but statistics show that driving under the influence actually causes much more harm to the public than simply carrying an unlicensed firearm. But, because white people make up 82 percent of people who are convicted of OUI, the state considers operating under the influence as a “public health problem,” so the charge is often resolved without a felony conviction. In fact, 77 percent of the people who don’t end up with a felony conviction after
admitting that they operated a vehicle under the influence are white.
However, despite Black defendants making up 16.4 percent of firearm cases in 2012, 46 percent of the people convicted of a firearm offense was Black. And 70.3 percent of the time, the Black person’s only offense was carrying a firearm without a license.
