Drugs, Racial Bias, and Academic Discord

Academic studies routinely offer conflicting results as they struggle to find solutions for public safety concerns or even identify root causes of crime. One area in particular where this occurs is in the study of racially biased policing, as scholars try to reconcile the disproportionately high arrest and incarceration rates for minorities across the country. In “Race, Place, and Drug Enforcement: Reconsidering the Impact of Citizen Complaints and Crime Rates on Drug Arrests,” a 2012 Criminology & Public Policy paper, authors Robin S. Engel, Michael R. Smith, and Francis T. Cullen reexamine the results of a study that found evidence of racial bias in drug arrests and find that factors unrelated to race can explain much of the disproportionate arrest rates among minority populations.

The authors reexamine “Race, Drugs, and Policing: Understanding Disparities in Drug Delivery Arrests,” a 2006 study of the racial makeup of Seattle drug arrests by Katherine Beckett, Kris Nyrop, and Lori Pfingst. This initial study, based on Seattle crime data collected between 1999 and 2001, found that race-neutral factors––community reports of crime and neighborhood crime rates––were not sufficient enough to explain why a disproportionate number of drug-related arrests involved minorities. By revisiting the initial study’s results using different data, Engel et al. compare data on the reporting of crimes to actual arrest reports, similar to the original study. They both reason that if there were police bias against minorities, the proportion of minorities who were actually arrested should be higher than the proportion of minority suspects in crime reports. However, Engel et al. argue that many of the data sources used in the 2006 study are not accurate or specific enough for effective analysis.

In the case of community reporting of crime, the original study used narcotics activity reports, which are non-emergency, written reports, often made by citizens at police precincts. Engel et al. believe that drug-related calls for service, which are made to the police over phone at the time of an incident, rather than in writing at a precinct, are a more accurate benchmark of community reports of crime. The authors also consider the original study to be lacking in geographic specificity. While the 2006 study uses large census tracts, the new study uses statistical reporting areas, which are maintained by the Seattle Police Department and give crime rate data in smaller geographic areas, in some cases at the block level.

Unlike in the original study, Engel et al. find that whites were more likely to be arrested than calls for service would suggest, while both African Americans and Hispanics were arrested at rates below expected levels. These results refute the original study’s conclusion that race-neutral factors could not support minority bias in drug arrests. Although this new research suggests that policing may be less racially-biased than some believe, the authors are quick to note several additional considerations. They concede that the design of the study is unable to account for any racial bias amongst those making calls for service. They also note that because policing techniques tend to focus the greatest enforcement efforts on the areas with higher calls for service––low income and minority neighborhoods––a higher level of police-minority interaction is unavoidable.

Racial bias in the criminal justice system will continue to be a controversial and highly studied issue. Evidence of this can be seen in the same issue of Criminology & Public Policy where Katherine Beckett, an author of the 2006 study, offers a strong rebuttal to this article. Continued academic discourse on this issue should help illuminate how racial issues affect the justice system and vice versa.

Feature Photo: cc/Chris J. Daniel