The Counterargument
To many people, the Criminal Justice system is racial and bias. I disagree. According to the larger topic of our project, my colleagues believe that the there is Institutional Racism in the Criminal Justice System. According to them, police arrest more blacks than whites in certain circumstances. One piece of evidence that they have is that the arrest rates for Marijuana Possession in the US shows a spike in black arrests. This information doesn’t show institutional racism. This arrest rate data is too specific. According to the statistics provided by the Department of Justice, between the years of 1990-2010, there have been a total of 13,122,110 arrests in America. These arrest vary from domestic violence, to littering, to resisting arrest. Anything that someone can be arrested for is included in this data. Well according to this data 9,122,010 people arrested were white. And 3,655,020 of the total arrest were blacks. This shows that there isn’t institutional racism due to the fact that almost 6 million more white people than black have been arrested over the course of ten years. The data that my colleagues use that say blacks have a 2 in 3 chance of being arrested is almost backwards than is actually shows. In this case out of approximately 12 million people arrested amongst white and blacks, whites are ⅔ of the arrest rates.
The Death Penalty is a serious penalty. This sentences a convict to death. The death penalty has been used since its reinstatement in 1976. According to data provided by the DeathPenalty.org, since 1976, there has been a total of 1369 death penalties in the US. Percentage wise, 56% of the sentences were of white descent. African Americans on the other hand only make up 34% of the death row sentences. This doesn't show any institutional racism because out of all the death row cases, 20% more whites have been killed than blacks. This doesn’t show any negative correlation regarding blacks and their sentencing.
There has been large controversy over the Stop-and-Frisk policy in New York. The policy allows officers to stop persons of interest and frisk them. Should they be committing a crime or carrying weapons or drugs illegally, they are arrested and imprisoned. Many people believe that this law and policy is unfair due to the fact that they believe that police stop people based on racial profiling. Most people don't really know how stop and frisk works. The policies and rules for stop and frisk have no racial discrimination embedded. For example, reasons for stopping and frisking someone is “wearing clothes commonly used in a crime, fits a relative suspect description, reports by victims/witnesses, verbal threats by victim, inappropriate attire for season, etc”. These reasons are more than legal reasons for stopping someone. The fact that the race variance largely differs does not imply racial profiling. According to the guidelines provided by the NYPD, the officers are just doing their jobs according to stop and frisk policies. The reasons have no racial bias within them. People are searched for the reasons they are given by law. Stop and frisk isn't racial profiling at all.
The article "The Concept of Institutional Racism" gives a detailed and informative report on how and why law enforcement agencies in America and the UK are institutionally racist against minority groups in urban areas. One of the possible explanations for this institutional racism is that “Police work, unlike most other professional activities, has the capacity to bring officers into contact with a skewed cross-section of society, with the well-recognised potential for producing negative stereotypes of particular groups. Such stereotypes become the common currency of the police occupational culture, and that if the predominantly white staff of the police organisation have their experience of visible minorities largely restricted to interactions with such groups, then negative racial stereotypes will tend to develop accordingly.” Additionally, since the majority of the crime in major cities occurs in the same areas where the minority groups are, that explains why the quote makes logical sense. The predominantly white police force in large cities are more actively patrolling and arresting people in the crime-ridden areas of the cities, which so happens to be the same areas where the minorities live.
Although many people believe that there is institutional racism in America, there is data that proves otherwise. Personally I do believe it exists but it is difficult to prove when you have manipulated data such as mines. But I do believe that institutional racism isn’t as common as it once was during the time of racism and early post slavery. Times have changed or for crying out loud, we have a black president, for god's sake.