Uneven policing creates a self-reinforcing loop that manufactures perceived crime

Evidence

During the crack craze in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the situation was the same. Whites and Blacks were selling and consuming illegal drugs at similar rates, but the Black users and dealers were getting arrested and convicted much more. In 1996, when two-thirds of the crack users were White or Latina/o, 84.5 percent of the defendants convicted of crack possession were Black. Even without the crucial factor of racial profiling of Blacks as drug dealers and users by the police, a general rule applied that still applies today: wherever there are more police, there are more arrests, and wherever there are more arrests, people perceive there is more crime, which then justifies more police, and more arrests, and supposedly more crime. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1091

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing feedback loop — police density → arrests → perceived crime → more police — is a dense causal spiral showing how racist policy reproduces its own justification without any conscious racist intent.
• QUESTION: This feedback loop is a candidate explanation for how supposedly ‘race-neutral’ policing intensifies the very perceptions it claims to respond to — worth testing against the modern predictive-policing literature.
• XREF: A perfect counterexample to the reader’s test question: does any case exist where ideas truly precede policy? Here the loop runs on density dynamics with no idea needed at all. — connects to: Control-oriented policing provokes the hostility it predicts among stopped minorities. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 905