Oakland officers who never restrained white people still searched Black people

Evidence

Highlighting “few” implies the probability that race will influence officers is low. It implies that race will only affect a small percentage of law enforcement. However, in our research in Oakland, for example, the disparities we uncovered were not concentrated in the behavior of just a handful of officers. In a thirteen-month period, three-quarters of all officers who made stops never handcuffed, searched, or arrested a White person they stopped. The majority of these same officers, however, had performed these actions on the African Americans they had stopped (Hetey et al., 2016a). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 391

Categorization

• SHARE: A crisp empirical counter to the bad-apples defense for a colleague working on policing data.
• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s theme that systemic bias persists without a few identifiable malicious actors — diffusion of bias across a workforce.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 391