Criminal (In)Justice by Rafael A. Mangual

Author:Rafael A. Mangual [A. MANGUAL, RAFAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781546001515
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

FALSE POSITIVES AND THE CODE OF THE STREET

The false-positive problem, and what it’s thought to represent, has animated much of the antipathy expressed toward the institution of policing; it has inspired litigation, investigations, and reforms aimed at limiting police activity—particularly in minority neighborhoods.

On a webpage titled “Ending Racist Stop and Frisk,” the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU notes in a section of “key facts” that more than 200,000 of the police-civilian encounters initiated by Boston police “led to no arrest,” and that “only 2.5% led to seizure of contraband.”3 Similar statistics were cited by those prosecuting the case against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices during this century’s first decade. In an article purporting to prove that the criminal justice system is racist, the Washington Post’s Radley Balko cites a study finding that Black motorists were more likely than white motorists to be searched when stopped by police even though “whites were more likely to be found with illicit drugs.”4

Being on the civilian side of a police encounter that turns out to be a false positive—that is, the encounter does not reveal evidence of a crime—can be both infuriating and deeply embarrassing. You can multiply those emotions by 10 when such encounters involve Black and brown men, which have been the subject of incredibly contentious debates about race and policing. The false-positive problem is perhaps the main contributor to the cloud of racial tension that hangs over many police interactions, because whenever a Black or brown male is stopped and frisked without the police finding any contraband, it contributes to the sense—widely held in many sectors of American society—that the typical police officer, through his subscription to negative stereotypes and his own biases, views people of color as criminals. Right or wrong, such encounters are regularly seized on to make the case that policing is an institution imbued with racism.

In his book Code of the Street—an ethnographic work (and one of the most important contributions to the sociological literature in my lifetime) that informs much of what’s to come in this chapter—sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the disturbing phenomenon of Black men “almost always [being] given extra scrutiny” by sales personnel when shopping in nicer neighborhoods, illustrating “the inability of some whites to make distinctions—particularly between people who are out to commit crime and those who are not.”5

And in 2016, Republican senator Tim Scott eloquently recounted on the Senate floor his own personal stories of being stopped and questioned by police pursuant to what turned out to be baseless suspicions that left him, as it does other Black men, “feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself.”6

When undergoing my own effort to think carefully about this problem, I remembered the stories at the top of this chapter and began to consider the following question: What if at least part of the false-positive problem isn’t just driven by police acting on racial biases, but also by cops picking up on cues that Black and brown men are themselves purposefully putting

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