We’re number ONE! (In prison population)
by digby
It has been so touching to see so many Real Americans express their deep concern about what they like to call “black on black” crime in recent days. Their compassion for their African American brothers and sisters is truly moving.
Today we have a very prominent Real American, one who is being talked up as a possible presidential choice to head the Department of Homeland Security, weighing in with a heart-rending display of true caring.
Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.
So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we’ve seen the fewest shootings in two decades.
To critics, none of this seems to much matter. Sidestepping the fact that these policies work, they continue to allege that massive numbers of minorities are stopped and questioned by police for no reason other than their race.
Never mind that in each of the city’s 76 police precincts, the race of those stopped highly correlates to descriptions provided by victims or witnesses to crimes. Or that in a city of 8.5 million people, protected by 19,600 officers on patrol (out of a total uniformed staff of 35,000), the average number of stops we conduct is less than one per officer per week.
Racial profiling is a disingenuous charge at best and an incendiary one at worst, particularly in the wake of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin. The effect is to obscure the rock-solid legal and constitutional foundation underpinning the police department’s tactics and the painstaking analysis that determines how we employ them…As a city, we have to face the reality that New York’s minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime. To ignore that fact, as our critics would have us do, would be a form of discrimination in itself.
He fails to note that crime has gone down as much or even more in other cities which do not employ such tactics. How odd.
I just don’t know what to say anymore about this. So I’ll just put up these graphs and let my fellow Americans decide for themselves if something might be a bit awry in our criminal justice system when it comes to racial and ethnic minorities:
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Take a good hard look at that last one. And see it in the context of the charts and graphs above it and our historical “issues” with race. And ask yourself what is motivating certain people to see those numbers and declare that we still aren’t putting enough African Americans and latinos in jail.
Links:
http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=122
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/07/27/some-trends-in-imprisonment/
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/08/02/blackwhite-disparities-in-prison-sentences/
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