By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.
The study, the first since the 1960s to look at the arrest histories of a national sample of adolescents and young adults over time, found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated reported having been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation.
That figure is significantly higher than the 22 percent found in a 1965 study that examined the same issue using different methods. The increase may be a reflection of the justice system becoming more punitive and more aggressive in its reach during the last half-century, the researchers said. Arrests for drug-related offenses, for example, have become far more common, as have zero-tolerance policies in schools.
The study did not look at racial or regional differences, but other research has found higher arrest rates for black men and for youths living in poor urban areas.
Criminal justice experts said the 30.2 percent figure was especially notable at a time when employers, aided by the Internet, routinely conduct criminal background checks on job candidates.
“This estimate provides a real sense that the proportion of people who have criminal history records is sizable and perhaps much larger than most people would expect,” said Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the State University at Albany and a co-author of the study, which appears in Monday’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.
The study analyzed data collected as part of the federal government’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The 7,335 participants were nationally representative and ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they were enrolled in the survey in 1996. The first interviews were conducted in 1997. Follow-up interviews have been carried out annually since then.
The researchers found that the probability of a first arrest accelerated in late adolescence and early adulthood — at 18, 15.9 percent of the participants reported having been arrested — and then began to flatten out as the youths entered their 20s.
Robert Brame, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the lead author of the study, said he hoped the research would alert physicians to signs that their young patients were at risk.
“We know that arrest occurs in a context,” Dr. Brame said. “There are other things going on in people’s lives at the time they get arrested, and those things aren’t necessarily good.”
If doctors can intervene, he added, “It can have big implications for what happens to these kids after the arrest, whether they become embedded in the criminal justice system or whether they shrug it off and move on.”
Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court spoke up for the constitutional rights of blacks and Hispanics on Wednesday by granting class-action status [ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/judge-allows-class-action-status-in-stop-and-frisk-lawsuit/ ] to a lawsuit that accuses the New York Police Department of using race as the basis for stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of citizens a year.
The decision [ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/356750-5-16-12-floyd-class-cert-opinion-and-order.html ] opens the door to potential claims by an enormous number of people who may have been illegally stopped, and any remedy would be applied citywide. In a fierce defense of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, Judge Scheindlin was profoundly critical of the police program. The city’s arguments, she wrote, “do not withstand the overwhelming evidence that there, in fact, exists a centralized stop-and-frisk program that has led to thousands of unlawful stops.” She allowed the class-action status because “the vast majority of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never bring suit to vindicate their rights.”
Instead of fighting the suit, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the city should be trying to settle this case and working immediately to reform a policy that violates rights and undermines trust in the police.
The stop-and-frisk program dates to the 1990s, when the police department adopted a “zero tolerance” approach to policing and began bearing down on minor crime as a way of preventing more serious crimes. Despite the city’s claims, there is no proof that this approach, by itself, reduced crime in New York because crime has fallen in many cities that do not follow New York’s lead.
Over time, the program has grown to alarming proportions. There were fewer than 100,000 stops in 2002, but the police department carried out nearly 700,000 in 2011 and appears to be on track to exceed that number this year. About 85 percent of those stops involved blacks and Hispanics, who make up only about half the city’s population. Judge Scheindlin said the evidence showed that the unlawful stops resulted from “the department’s policy of establishing performance standards and demanding increased levels of stops and frisks.”
She noted that police officers had conducted tens of thousands of clearly unlawful stops in every precinct of the city, and that in nearly 36 percent of stops in 2009, officers had failed to list an acceptable “suspected crime.” The police are required to have a reasonable suspicion to make a stop. Only 5.37 percent of all stops between 2004 and 2009, the period of data considered by the court, resulted in arrests, an indication that a vast majority of people stopped did nothing wrong. Judge Scheindlin rebuked the city for a “deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.” The message of this devastating ruling is clear: The city must reform its abusive stop-and-frisk policy.
Ava Greenwell says racial profiling of their children by police is every African-American parent's nightmare.
By Ava Greenwell, Special to CNN updated 6:05 PM EDT, Fri September 21, 2012
Editor's note: Ava Thompson Greenwell is a journalism professor at Medill, Northwestern University and a doctoral student in African-American studies. She has been teaching broadcast writing and video storytelling since 1993 and is a former news reporter at WFLA-TV in Florida, WCCO-TV in Minnesota and WEHT-TV in Indiana.
While sitting in my backyard I heard adult male voices around the side of the house. I opened the gate and saw a white police officer handcuffing my 13-year-old son. The plainclothes Evanston, Illinois, officer and his partner did not identify themselves as police. They did not ask our son's age or where he lived. They told him first to put his hands up and then handcuffed him. They assumed he was guilty, of what we didn't know. His crime appeared to be that he was a black male.
Later, we would listen to the 911 tape of what preceded the incident. It was apparent police had targeted my son while he was riding his bike home from a friend's house. Why? According to officers, he fit the description of a burglary suspect who had allegedly entered a nearby home. The description they offered: a black male wearing cargo shorts.
Our son was wearing cargo shorts, but that identification could have applied to hundreds of black males in Evanston on that particular day. Why didn't the 911 dispatcher ask for a more detailed description of his skin color? His build? Whether he had facial hair? (He doesn't.) Whether he had a tattoo or piercings? (He doesn't.) Or whether he was wearing a hat? (He was.)
Authorities on the scene didn't care about my son's other attributes. He is an honor roll student, saxophone player, basketball player and law-abiding teenager. All they saw was his gender and race.
To make matters worse, after handcuffing him, police paraded him to the front of our house in full view of neighbors and passersby, and at least three other armed, uniformed officers surrounded him and me. They leaned him against a cop car, his hands still cuffed behind him, and made him wait so the alleged victim could be driven over to identify him in what's known as a "show up."
When I protested, asking why my son needed to be handcuffed, they told me he might flee. Give me a break! He's going to try to run with five armed cops and his mother standing near him? The humiliation of being forced to participate in a quasi-lineup was unconscionable. When the alleged victim said our son was not the intruder, the officer uncuffed him and his partners left almost as quickly as they had swarmed in. But before the officer who handcuffed our son left, I demanded an apology.
The halfhearted response seemed insincere at best. He didn't even look either of us in the eyes. These officers clearly did not like it that I verbally resisted my son's detainment or my telling them it seemed like racial profiling.
That police could handcuff a fully cooperating, nonresisting 13-year-old boy at his home with his mother in plain sight ought to leave all Americans shaking in their boots. It was unnecessary. It was unfair -- un-American. But it happens more often than we know, particularly to young African-Americans, who often don't have the resources to advocate for themselves.
This is the United States of America, where one is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. But this rarely applies if you're a male of African descent. Trayvon Martin's killer has claimed self-defense, but did Martin deserve to be approached by a neighborhood watchman and shot to death? He was carrying a bag with soda and some Skittles candy, not a weapon.
I'm reminded of the 2009 incident involving Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, one of the nation's top African-American scholars. Gates returned home to find his key wouldn't work because his lock was jammed. Initially, police thought he was breaking into his own home. Even though he produced identification to prove he lived in the house, he was ultimately arrested for disorderly conduct after he angrily accused officers of racial profiling. Prosecutors dropped the charges.
I teach at Northwestern University, which is home to the Medill Innocence Project, a program whose work has overturned wrongful convictions and influenced Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn's effort to end the state's death penalty. It's not surprising that many of those exonerated are African-American men. In fact, the National Registry of Exonerations tracked 958 former convicts exonerated in the United States. Of that total, 45% were African-American men, even though they make up only about 6%-7% of the country's population.
Racial profiling has a long history in the United States and there seems to be little relief in the so-called "age of Obama." A 2009 American Civil Liberties Union report called racial and ethnic profiling "a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the United States, impacting the lives of millions of people in African-American, Asian, Latino, South Asian and Arab communities." In 2012 it continues to be a common rite of passage for young black males. Just ask any black male you know and he will tell you a story. No wonder some hate the police.
My husband and I cannot undo what happened to our son. At 13 he is now officially inducted into black manhood. I shudder to think what could have happened if I had not been home. Thank God we had taught him at around age 10 to cooperate with police. He complied in every way.
But what if he'd gotten scared and run? What if he had reached for his cell phone and police thought it was a weapon? The officers never patted him down. What if police had planted something on him? What if the victim had lied and said my son was the perpetrator?
To be sure, police officers have a tough and dangerous job and are vulnerable to injury at a moment's notice. They should try to catch criminals, but not at the expense of treating people with respect and dignity. We have to fight crime without automatically indicting black males. The ACLU report concluded that alienating marginalized groups would ultimately prevent police from reducing crime.
When police make mistakes, they must own up to them. They could have identified themselves first and politely asked my son some questions with me present. They also could have profusely apologized.
Despite our harrowing experience, I know we are lucky. It was 10 minutes of our lives. The truth prevailed and we will move on. But we will never be the same.
The incident is forever seared into my brain and is giving me sleepless nights. The worry I already had for my son being away from home or school is now magnified right at the time he wants to be more independent.
We've told our son that he shouldn't think all police officers are bad. However, it is clear more training of Evanston dispatchers and police officers is needed.
To parents of African-American youth, as your children (particularly males) return to the routine of classes and homework, remember to school them about the police.
They are not always their friends. It's unfair that black parents have to teach this lesson while most white parents don't. But if we don't educate them early and often we may be sending them to an early grave.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ava Thompson Greenwell.
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