Racial crime-rate differences cannot fully explain police contact disparities

Evidence

In response to claims that law enforcement target people of color, a common refrain is that police are simply “going where the crime is.” If high crime areas have higher concentrations of African Americans and if it is seen as an effective policing strategy to stop more people in these high crime areas, then a consequence, even if an indirect one, is that more African Americans will be stopped. Further, there is evidence of racial disparities in rates of violent crime (Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2013; 2016; Morgan & Truman, 2018). To the extent that different groups commit crimes at different rates, we would expect police contact and stop rates to mirror those differences. In these scenarios, race is not the driving factor; crime is. While crime certainly shapes enforcement patterns, the evidence demonstrates that higher rates of police contact with community members of color, relative to Whites, cannot be fully explained by general crime rates (e.g., Hetey et al., 2016a) or by differential rates of criminal activity between racial groups (Gelman, Fagan, & Kiss, 2007). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 361 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For example, officers use force approximately 1 percent to 2 percent of the time across all contact with community members, but about 15 percent to 20 percent of the time when making an arrest (cited in Smith, Kaminski, Alpert, Fridell, MacDonald, & Kubu, 2010). … Crime rate is an important benchmark. Measures of specific kinds of crime, such as arrests for violent crime as opposed to arrests for property crime, can serve as a proxy for the types of provocative or criminal behavior officers are trained to perceive as a threat and respond to with force (Cesario, Johnson, & Terrill, 2018; Goff et al., 2016). … After accounting for crime, the raw and population-indexed racial disparities in use of force tend to narrow to the point of no longer being statistically significant, or the gap is even reversed, such that Whites become statistically more likely than Blacks to have force used against them (Cesario et al., 2018; Goff et al., 2016). … After controlling for crime, statistically significant racial disparities have been found for less lethal force, but not lethal force (Fryer, 2019; Goff et al., 2016). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 375 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Skin tone predicts police stops for Latinos as well as Blacks; Racial disparities in policing arise from systemic forces, not individual racism; Crime-rate differences cannot fully explain racial disparities in police stops. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 361 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Crime-rate differences cannot fully explain racial disparities in police stops. #corroborates (0.98) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 361
• Controlling for crime rates can reverse or erase racial use-of-force disparities #complicates (0.85) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 375