Earl Ofari Hutchinson
I saw something that can only be described as tantamount to the 8th wonder of the world. That is a white man being stopped, cuffed, and led away by the police. What made this even more a work of wonderment is that it happened in almost exclusively Black and Hispanic South Los Angeles.
Now when I drive through more affluent, more white parts of Los Angeles I almost never see a police cruiser, or any police presence. I have often quipped only half facetiously that I could walk down one of the busiest streets butt naked in one of those neighborhoods and never be arrested since the police presence there is practically nil.
But back to the arrest of the white man I witnessed. I can count on one hand and still have a couple of fingers the last few years the times I have seen police arrest a white man. At the same time if I had a nickel for every time I have seen the cops stop, search, and arrest a young Black or almost as frequently a Hispanic male I’d be a multi-millionaire. And this is in all parts of the city.
The figures on the over policing, and vastly over arresting of Blacks continue to tell the grim tale of lop-sided police targeting, profiling, and singling out of Black males for arrest. According to FBI Uniform Crime Reports Blacks though about twelve percent of the population make up more than a quarter of all arrests.
Here are the staggering numbers. They make up more than half of murder arrests, more than half of robbery arrests, nearly thirty percent of burglary and motor vehicle theft arrests, more than forty percent of prostitution arrests, and more than one-quarter of drug arrests.
Blacks remain the runaway leader in incarceration on all ethnic groups. They are more than three times more likely than whites to be imprisoned. Here’s the eye-popping figure. The combined state and federal imprisonment rate for Black sentenced prisoners was 1,096 per 100,000 U.S. residents compared to 214 per 100,000 U.S. residents for whites.
The law and order, ultra conservatives, GOP, and Trump bunch routinely counter that Blacks are arrested in greater numbers because they commit more crimes. They are arrested because police have armies of office in Black neighborhoods and a token force in white neighborhoods. More police mean more arrests and invariably more prosecutions, sentencing and imprisonment. This badly skews the numbers and fuels the public impression that Blacks are more danger crime prone menaces.
I told the arresting officers that I should take a picture of their arrest of a white man for posterity. They laughed. But the systemic filling the courts and jails with mostly poor young Blacks, not whites, will always be no laughing matter.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is White-Supremacist-In-Chief (Middle Passage Press) He is the publisher of thehutchinsonreport.net