Columnist
When I was growing up in St. Louis, the nearby town of Belleville, Ill., had an unsavory reputation. It was a lot like those municipalities described in Sundown Towns, a new book by sociologist James W. Loewen. The author defines sundown towns as municipalities – usually located in such distinctly non-Southern locales as Illinois, Michigan and Ohio – that kept blacks out through a combination of legal formalities and violent intimidation.
In any gathering of black men, from barbershops to barbecues, stories of Belleville’s hostility and its aggressive police were likely to be exchanged. They were riveting, instructive and just the sort of examples to be smugly dismissed by skeptics. Mere anecdotes, they would say, without data to back them up.
But during the 1990s, new reports in the Belleville News-Democrat (and later on 60 Minutes) revealed the truth of those stories. After analyzing more than 175,000 traffic tickets, the paper presented persuasive statistical evidence of a special police team organized specifically to target and harass black motorists from the adjacent Illinois city of East St. Louis.
Savvy journalism led to an investigation by the Illinois Department of Human Rights. Threat of legal action by that agency forced Belleville to hire an affirmative-action officer and institute sensitivity training for its then all-white police force. Tiny steps, to be sure, but significant ones for a city that didn’t hire its first black municipal employee – a sanitation worker – until 1991.
Statistics don’t always support our initial contentions. Sometimes they indicate the opposite of what we believed to be true, forcing us to reconsider issues we thought had already been easily decided. Numbers are not always on our side, but they suggest a plausibility that personal experiences don’t always convey, especially regarding volatile issues such as race relations. In an age in which journalistic investigations such as the one mentioned above are increasingly fraught with peril, the role of statisticians has inevitably become more critical.
Which makes the recent turmoil at the U.S. Department of Justice all the more disturbing. In April, one of its branches, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, completed a report on the nature of contact between nearly 80,000 residents of the United States and police in 2002. The report found that the likelihood of being pulled over by police during that year “did not differ significantly between white (8.7 percent), black (9.1 percent), and Hispanic (8.6 percent) drivers.”
Those numbers are surprising to many of us who have been on the receiving end of such encounters. But they are solid statistics, and we should accord them at least as much weight as the stories with which we are so familiar. The same is true of the breakdown of the numbers in the study: “Blacks were 11 percent of drivers stopped by police but 25.7 percent of drivers who were handcuffed, and Hispanics were 9.5 percent of stopped drivers but 19.4 percent of those handcuffed. Whites were 76.5 percent of stopped drivers and 55.1 percent of drivers were handcuffed.”
In addition, “police were more likely to use force against a black (2.7 percent) or Hispanic (2.4 percent) driver than a white (0.8 percent) driver.” The study defines force as “contacts in which the police officer pushed, grabbed, kicked, or hit the resident.” Hitting was defined as “striking with the hand or an object held in the officer’s hand” as well as “police dog bites, spray with pepper spray or a chemical, and firearm pointed in the resident’s direction.”
Lawrence A. Greenfeld, the Bush appointee who heads the Bureau of Justice Statistics, wanted to publicize the racial disparities found in the study but was overruled by his superiors. The report was issued without a news release in April, and Greenfeld was threatened with dismissal. He is moving to a lesser job in a different department.
To those of us who have lamented the inept leadership that has plagued the Justice Department throughout George W. Bush’s administration, we now have further evidence of the department’s moral obtuseness and unscrupulous manipulation of information. These are not surprising given the administration’s history of such maneuverings.
Shortly after taking over the reins as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales agreed to the removal of the $8,000 drapes that concealed the department’s famous Spirit of Justice statue during John Ashcroft’s tenure. Gonzales, whose name is affixed to the study that his people tried to bury, evidently is not averse to more substantial forms of covering up.
A former reporter for the American, Jabari Asim is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is asimj@washpost.com.