Beach Disputes Study on Racial Bias in Arrests
| AR Articles on Crime |
|---|
| Why Race Matters (Oct. 1997) |
| Race, Crime, and Violence (Jul. 1999) |
| Race and Psychopathic Personality (Jul. 2002 |
| Search AmRen.com for Crime |
| More news stories on Crime |
The headline on the news release touting an advocacy group’s study released Monday blared: “Virginia Beach Leads the Nation in Rising Racial Disparity in Drug Arrests.”
Beach authorities, however, dispute the study’s methodology and conclusions.
The report, by criminal justice research group The Sentencing Project, said that, between 1980 and 2003, the ratio of black arrests to white arrests for drug crimes increased by nearly 11 times, the biggest such jump among the nation’s large cities. The numbers were based on arrest rates per 100,000 people by race.
“The war on drugs has been waged in the African American community, and Virginia Beach is a stark example of that,” said Ryan King, author of the study, which looked at drug arrests in 43 major cities with populations of more than 250,000.
{snip}
The report found that for every four black people arrested in Virginia Beach in 2003, one white was arrested. In 1980, Beach police arrested about three whites for every black for drug crimes, the report said.
Beach police said their statistics, also based on arrests per 100,000, showed that in 1980 they arrested 1.77 whites for every black and in 2003, they arrested 2.63 blacks for every white.
Using those figures, police said, the ratio of black arrests to white arrests would have increased by 4.7 times, not 11 times, as The Sentencing Project found. The police numbers would place Virginia Beach fifth among the 43 cities in the report, between Columbus, Ohio (6.7), and Atlanta (4.5).
Both sides agreed there’s no evidence to show that blacks are more likely to possess or deal drugs. So, why the higher arrest rate?
Cervera said the trend is related to the department’s shift toward “community policing ” in the 1990s. Officers were assigned to work high-crime neighborhoods instead of zones. Those areas tend to have more black residents, he said. “We put people in neighborhoods where crime occurs, and when we arrest people, a lot of the time they have dope,” he said.
Another theory, which King, Cervera and Old Dominion University professor Scott Maggard agreed on, is that blacks more often buy and sell drugs outside and to strangers, while whites tend to sell in homes to people they generally know.
{snip}
The most obvious flaw in the study, police said, is that all the figures are derived using the city’s 1990 U.S. census racial breakdown of 10 percent black and about 86 percent white. By the 2000 census, Virginia Beach was 19 percent black and about 71 percent white. The black population in 2006 was estimated at about 20 percent of the total.
{snip}
King acknowledged that not accounting for the increasing black population in Virginia Beach skewed the study toward showing that a higher percentage of blacks were arrested for drugs.
He said the main point of the study remained valid: Blacks still are being arrested more frequently on drug charges. “There are no studies of use, abuse or selling dynamics,” he said, “that support the scope of disparity we see.”
Email Aaron Applegate at aaron.applegate@pilotonline.com.
(Posted on May 14, 2008)
Comments
Ryan King, who wrote the study is completely baffled, “There are no studies of use, abuse or selling dynamics,” he said, “that support the scope of disparity we see.”
Can these people lose their funding due to incompetence? Someone should send him The Color of Crime before it’s too late for him.
Posted by Just another AmRener at 6:22 PM on May 14
Both sides agreed there’s no evidence to show that blacks are more likely to possess or deal drugs. So, why the higher arrest rate?
The “higher arrest rate” itself is not evidence??
… blacks more often buy and sell drugs outside and to strangers, while whites tend to sell in homes to people they generally know.
Of course! Whites are involved in drugs just the same as blacks, they just be mo’ sneaky.
Posted by at 7:14 PM on May 14
King claims “There are no studies of use, abuse or selling dynamics,” —-“that would support the scope of disparity we see.”. I disagree, the arrests themselves amount to a study of the difference in use, abuse and selling of drugs by blacks versus whites. In fact I would submit it is the most valid laboaratory study one can conceive. Any other study has to be based in large part on what the participants are willing to volunteer truthfully on their own.
Posted by at 7:41 PM on May 14
The headline on the news release touting an advocacy group’s study released Monday blared: “Virginia Beach Leads the Nation in Rising Racial Disparity in Drug Arrests.”
I want to applaud Mr. Applegate for doing his job instead of accepting the findings of The Sentencing Project as gospel.
As Mr. Applegate notes in the above quoted first paragraph, the information is the work of an advocacy group. Most reporters are lazy and they’re all to happy to take these news releases at face value. That’s why I refer to most reporting today as ‘copy and paste journalism’.
A good reporter will take the information he’s given and look at it objectively. I would hope that good reporters would take a look at the press releases put out by The New Century Foundation and give them an objective read through. Alas, their knee-jerk reaction is to reject them because they’re counter to their politically correct paradigm. The fact that they run to their friends at the SPLC for counter arguments only goes to show how closely linked the press is to liberal advocacy groups.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 7:46 PM on May 14
“Both sides agreed there’s no evidence to show that blacks are more likely to possess or deal drugs.”
that sentence alone disqualifies either “side” from having their opinion count for anything.
Posted by pickelhaube at 8:46 PM on May 14
“Both sides agreed there’s no evidence to show that blacks are more likely to possess or deal drugs.”
At first this statement sounds like “freedom is slavery” or “ignorance is strength” but I look back at my college days and realize there is truth. College kids do more drugs than non-college kids. College kids often become small time dealers. (I wasn’t into drugs but I knew half a dozen kids who sold a couple of bags every once in a while.)
Posted by at 8:58 PM on May 14
Virginia Beach is a beautiful place….I know I have been there many times….and now they say there are disputes in how many blacks get arrested for drugs….gessshh….no matter where they go….they still act like thugs and doing drugs is part of their culture…you know…it’s everyone elses fault that they get caught….it’s not like they try to hide it…they are as brazen as a street walker on a Saturday night!!! You do the crime then belly up to the bar, and do the time….quit the damn whining!!!
Posted by lydia at 9:09 PM on May 14
“Virginia Beach Leads the Nation in Rising Racial Disparity in Drug Arrests.
“Beach authorities, however, dispute the study’s methodology and conclusions.”
Of course they dispute the facts. They’re either black and feel a need to lie about the disparity or they’re rabid liberals who just can’t seem to want to grasp the truth.
Nothing unusual here.
Posted by w.r. at 10:13 PM on May 14
The Virginia beach area is a black hell hole,crime is rampant!
Posted by at 12:03 AM on May 15
“Both sides agreed there’s no evidence to show that blacks are more likely to possess or deal drugs.”
Really??? C’mon. Now you are all just lying to yourselves.
Posted by at 12:12 AM on May 15
What are blacks doing in a beach community anyway? Waterskiing? In my beach community, they’re usually committing home invasions, blocking boardwalks, picking fights with anyone who wanders by, and screaming hysterically as the cops cuff ‘em and haul them away by the truckload.
Anyone who can’t swim has no business in a place that has “Beach” in its name, IMHO…
Posted by Kevin at 12:43 AM on May 15
It’s the media again. This trash is meant to be disseminated across the entire liberal media. It is meant to be accepted as gospel truth. Instead it is a pack of craven lies.Blacks are arrested more because they commit more crimes. End of story. Wake up and smell the stench of the lying media. They are our enemies. Do not compromise-boycott boycott and then boyctt some more.
Posted by at 5:22 PM on May 16
Yesterday our paragon of ‘slanted’ journalism, The Houston Chronicle ran an editorial to the effect Houston is caught in ‘a crime wave. The proposed solution? Throw money at the problem: More overtime for cops, hire more cops!
Pity everyone’s mental faculties are too impaired to grasp the ROOT CAUSES of our crime problem. Causes definable as: (a) a huge influx of Afro-American post-Katrina refugees from New Orleans; (b)that we have far too many [mostly illega] Mexican immmigrants in the Houston area.
Mexicans used to commit probably 70% of local crime; then the hardworking Blacks from N.O. contributed their share, with the result it’s now an even split between these two races of pathological misfits and failures.
But we do live in a world not unlike that visited by Alice (in Wonderland) and our politicians live in mortal fear (lost votes) of offending any racial minority group. So we have the utter insanity of our anti-racial profiling laws… and yet officials claim they can’t understand the steady rise in street crime. Go figure, as they say.
Posted by Fed Up at 8:18 AM on May 19