The police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, among others, have drawn renewed attention to police racism and brutality. But unequal enforcement of the law has been with us for decades. Here are some measures of that disparity.
- Black people were 2.5x more likely than whites to experience or be threatened with the use of force by police in 2015, according to a 2018 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the U.S. Justice Department.
- In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered, more than half (58%) of police use-of-force incidents involved Black people, who make up just 19% of the city’s population, according to The New York Times.
- A recent ABC News investigation of FBI data from jurisdictions served by the network’s stations concluded that, in 800 of them, Black people were arrested at 5x the rate of white people in 2018. Black people were 10x more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.
- In 250 jurisdictions, Black men are 2.5x more likely than white men to be killed by police, according to a 2019 study using data from the prior five-year period. Black women were 1.4x more likely than white women to be killed, a rate that’s roughly the same for Latinx men.
- The officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin, had at least 17 prior complaints, including several for excessive use of force. Of the 1,490 misconduct complaints filed against Minneapolis police between 2015 and 2020, just 29 resulted in disciplinary action, such as a written reprimand.
- Black motorists are pulled over by police and subjected to vehicle searches at higher rates than white motorists, even though white motorists are statistically more likely to be found with contraband.
- A 2019 survey of traffic tickets in Indianapolis and its suburbs found that Black drivers received 1.5 tickets for every ticket issued to a white driver. In one wealthy suburb, the ratio was 18 to 1.
- A national study published in 2018 found the arrest rate for Black people is at least 2x as high as for whites for such offenses as disorderly conduct, drug possession, simple assault, theft, vagrancy, and vandalism.
- The incarceration rate for Black people is 5x higher than that for whites.
- Black people comprise only about 5% of drug users but account for 29% of drug crime arrests and 33% of drug-crime incarcerations.
- A 2017 study by the National Registry of Exonerations found that Black people are 3.5x more likely than whites to be wrongfully convicted of sexual assault and 12x more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug crimes.