Why Black People Running From the Police Makes Perfect Sense [View all]

[eridani]

I was going to file this under "Thank you, Captain Obvious," but the study goes into quite a lot of telling detail.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/17882/why-black-people-running-from-the-police-makes-perfect-sense

These low-level warrants in particular are a huge issue with police interactions.

When I was writing this book, we didn’t know how many people had low-level warrants; we just weren’t collecting that data nationally. We now know that there’s about 2 million warrants that have been reported voluntarily to the database, and leaving a huge number that haven’t been reported. About 60% of these warrants are not for new crimes, but for technical violations of parole, unpaid court fees, unpaid child support, traffic fines, curfew violations, court fees. And it’s this group of people that are terrified. If they’re stopped by the cops, any of these reasons is enough to bring them in, to get them trapped into the system again.

It goes well beyond being guilty, or even just running from the cops. There’s this story in your book where this young man wants to get a state I.D. during the time he’s clean (i.e. free of warrants). But he just sits there—this big tough guy—and he can’t bring himself to go in.

If you’re part of this class, it means you don’t go to the hospital when you’re sick. You’re wary of visiting friends in the hospital or attending their funerals. Driving your kid to school can be daunting. You don’t have a driver’s license or ID. Most of the time, you can’t seek legal employment. You can’t get help from the government. It comes from, partly, growing up in a neighborhood where you’ve watched your uncles and brothers go to jail, and your aunts and mom entangled in the court system without ever getting free.

You note that women in particular face a great deal of police pressure to inform or cooperate in some fashion.

In a poll I did of the women [living in the four block radius of 6th Street], 67% said that they’d been pressured by the police to provide information on a male family member or partner in the last three years. If you’ve got a low-level warrant or some probation issue, you can be violated by authorities if you don’t inform when asked. So you’re really talking about a policing system that hinges on turning families against each other and sowing a lot of suspicion and distrust. It’s very ironic that people blame the breakdown of black family life on the number of black men behind bars when the policing strategies that put them there are exactly about breaking those family bonds.