Race & Justice News: Federal Agency Targets People of Color in Drug Sting Operations…and More

(From The Sentencing Project)

Brad Heath of USA Today reports that 91% of individuals arrested in drug sting operations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in the past decade have been racial minorities – nearly all black or Hispanic. “That rate is far higher than among people arrested for big-city violent crimes, or for other federal robbery, drug and gun offenses,” notes Heath. This estimate is based on court files and prison records for 635 defendants arrested in ATF’s stash house stings. These operations – which have more than quadrupled in the past decade, though fallen this year – are designed to combat gun crime by producing “long prison sentences for suspects enticed by the promise of pocketing as much as $100,000 for robbing a drug stash house that does not actually exist.” Melvin King, ATF’s deputy assistant director for field operations, has rejected claims of racial profiling and stated: “We’re targeting the worst of the worst, and we’re looking for violent criminals that are using firearms in furtherance of other illegal activities.”

Although ATF officials state the agency uses criminal records, police intelligence files, and confidential informants to identify people already responsible for violent robberies, Heath notes that in two cases government informants have described randomly identifying targets in black and Latino neighborhoods. Federal courts are now weighing in. One case reviewed by a U.S. District Court in California was declared unconstitutional, with Judge Manuel Real chiding ATF for “trolling poor neighborhoods to ensure and ensnare its poor citizens.” A federal appeals court in Chicago is considering charges of entrapment in another operation.

Prosecution

Racial Disparities Highlighted in New York City Prosecutions

Racial biases continue to influence criminal prosecutions in Manhattan, finds a new study by the Vera Institute of Justice. At the request of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., Vera partnered on a two-year National Institute of Justice study on the relationship between prosecutorial decision-making and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Analyzing 222,542 cases resolved in 2010–2011, the 251-page report reveals that blacks and Latinos were at a disadvantage relative to whites in three key stages of criminal cases (pretrial detention, plea bargaining, and incarceration sentence), but not in two (case acceptance and case dismissal). In fact, whites were less likely than blacks and Latinos to have their cases dismissed. “This finding,” note authors Besiki Luka Kutateladze and Nancy R. Andiloro, “raises the question of whether having higher dismissal rates for defendants of color should be viewed as an indicator of leniency, or simply serve as a mechanism for declining to prosecute cases that could have been rejected at screening.”

The starkest disparities were found in the prosecution of misdemeanor drug offenses: blacks were 27% more likely and Hispanics were 18% more likely to receive a custodial sentence offer than similarly situated white defendants. Surprisingly, prior arrest record was more influential on sentence offers than prior sentence history, in accordance with this office’s plea guidelines. The authors recommend revising these guidelines because if they were “based on prior sentences, as opposed to prior arrest, much of the difference between black and white, and Latino and white defendants would have disappeared, at least in misdemeanor cases.”

The New York Times reports that the study has prompted the Manhattan District Attorney to call for implicit bias training for his assistant prosecutors. The Times’ Editorial Board commends Vance for inviting this analysis of his office and, echoing the Vera authors, urges him to “reduce prosecutors’ emphasis on prior arrests and work with his staff to accept fewer cases in the first place.”

In neighboring Brooklyn, the District Attorney’s Office will stop prosecuting low-level marijuana cases in an attempt to improve the administration of justice and put the office’s resources to better use. District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson said in a confidential memo that the policy was set up to keep nonviolent people, “and especially young people of color,” out of the criminal justice system, according to the New York Times. Possession of marijuana is still illegal in the state, and Brooklyn is the only borough to issue this policy. Those arrested in Brooklyn will undergo a case-by-case review and only those with no or minimal criminal records will qualify under the policy.

Policing

Justice Department Requires Police Agencies to Reduce Racial Bias

Three-quarters of pedestrian stops by Newark police in recent years were unconstitutional, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation reported in the Los Angeles Times. Although blacks accounted for 54% of the city’s population, they made up 81% of pedestrian stops and 79% of arrests. Blacks were also more than three times as likely to be frisked as whites, even though rates of recovering evidence did not differ by race, highlights NPR’s Code Switch blog. Based on its investigation, the DOJ announced that it would assign a federal monitor to the Newark Police Department.

DOJ consent decrees and memos of understanding affect about 20 cities, with a recent agreement reached in Albuquerque and an investigation underway in Cleveland. This federal oversight has drawn mixed reactions from local officials. Federal monitor Merrick Bobb praised new Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole for her efforts to comply with a two-year-old consent decree requiring reforms to curtail excessive force and racially-biased policing. However, the Seattle Times reported several weeks earlier that more than 100 Seattle police officers filed a lawsuit claiming the consent decree created a “bold, new disregard for police authority in the streets of Seattle.” The suit has drawn the ire of Seattle Mayor Ed Murray who responded: “The police department will comply with that court order. The City of Seattle will not fight the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. This is not the 1960s.”

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Rep. Cedric Richmond have asked for additional funding to comply with a two-year-old consent decree, reports the Times-Picayune. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Richmond wrote, “these consent decrees are far too expensive for a recovering and challenged city like New Orleans to bear while concurrently investing in the safety of her citizens.” The decree came after DOJ investigators found evidence of “discriminatory policing based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.”

VA Police Chief Says Bias Not Cause of Racially Disparate Drug Arrests

After reviewing the results of an internal study, Danville, Virginia Police Chief Philip Broadfoot is confident that racial bias is not fueling racial disparities in drug arrests.

The Danville Register & Bee reports that black residents accounted for 71% of the city’s 731 drug arrests in 2013 – figures highlighted at a City Council meeting last December by Carolyn LaViscount, a concerned citizen. Danville, bordering North Carolina with a population of 43,000, is 49% African American. The police study found that 47% of the drug arrests resulted from traffic stops, 21% from other officer-initiated encounters, 15% were complaint-driven, and the remainder were from extra duty work, checkpoints, and warrant service. Broadfoot explained that the disparities in many of these categories resulted from the location of police work and officers’ suspicion of criminal behavior. The “bottom line,” Broadfoot told reporter Allison Roberts, is that “if an officer pulls someone over, that officer has to articulate why they asked for a search and what the driver’s behavior is to warrant such a search.”

LaViscount had told the City Council that racism “may not be the acknowledged intent of the policies that determine how drug crimes are handled, but it is certainly the effect.” After meeting with Danville United – a community relations coalition – Chief Broadfoot agreed to consider two strategies to reduce racial disparity in drug arrests: analyze data on drug types for which arrests are made, and offer racial sensitivity and diversity training for incoming officers. But, as Roberts writes, “Broadfoot explained that training officers to deal with people in a professional manner is much more effective than diversity training.”

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