The New York Times editorial, Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests, makes the point that blacks and Hispanics show overwhelming disparities in being arrested and convicted for drug offenses. 

Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement’s overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use.

The key part of the quote is that this happens “despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use.”  If true, this shoots a huge hole in the theory that the reason there are disproportionate blacks and Hispanics in prison is because they commit more crimes (or are more inclined to commit crimes, as has been argued by Paul Cassell as well as certain commenters here).

While it’s unclear how these reports reach the conclusion that the rate of illegal drug use is about the same for people of all races and colors, the back end argument provides carries indisputable weight, that law enforcement attention is “overwhelmingly focus[ed] on drug use in low-income urban areas.”

The cop answer is the Willie Sutton answer: because that’s where the drugs are. 

While this is no doubt true (it’s hard to argue with 1000 dime bags of heroin), it misses the point.  Going after blacks and Hispanics in poor urban neighborhoods is like shooting fish in a barrel.  There is no one to complain about running roughshod over constitutional rights in the process, and even if someone was to complain, there’s no one who would care. 

Use of facile “exceptions” to reason and argument, seen in such phrases as “high crime area” and “for the officers’ safety” seem to trump all other points.  Then there’s always “furtive gestures,” which is the Mastercard to ignore the 4th Amendment.  It used to be the dropsy cases in New York that made all other search problems disappear, but it was so overplayed that even the courts caught on.

Put any community under a microscope and it looks ugly.  You will find that even upstanding people in neighborhoods with nice homes and expensive cars do things that they would really rather keep to themselves.  But it’s hard to peek inside the windows of these sprawling ranches and split levels without getting caught.  And the homeowners are more likely to know somebody in power, and to be given the benefit of the doubt.  They can do as they please in the privacy of their rumpus rooms, while poor people need to do it out on the street where they are easy targets.  They have no rumpus rooms.

For a while, New York City police would cordon off an entire city block in uptown Manhattan.  Anyone within the block, or trying to get in or out of the block, would be subject to search.  It was an outrageous strategy, lacking any particularity to deprive huge numbers of blacks and Hispanics their right to be left alone.  But there is no such right in poor neighborhoods.

I argued many of these cases.  The judges didn’t care.  They weren’t listening.  They knew, and they weren’t going to do anything about it.  I was unable to persuade them to be as outraged as I was.  But this never happened on Sutton Place.  No New York matron was ever stopped and frisked because she walked from the front door of her brownstone to the waiting limousine.

Then there are the “affidavit buildings.”  These are the Bronx tenements where the owner has signed an affidavit permitting the cops to question and search anyone entering their building.  Somebody enters to visit a tenant, and is accosted by police in the lobby, who ask them where they are going and, if they don’t answer fast enough or perhaps just for sport, toss them against the wall for a frisk. 

You may wonder how an owner’s affidavit terminates a visitor’s constitutional rights.  Initially, so did many judges, but after a while, the wonderment stopped and the practice became routinely accepted.  When entering a building on Park Avenue in the upper 50s, no one is ever tossed against a wall for a routine frisk. 

I don’t know whether people on Sutton Place or Park Avenue engage in illicit drug use at an equivalent pace as people on St. Nicholas Avenue.  I know some do, but I haven’t taken a valid survey.  Unlike others, I will not use my anecdotal knowledge as proof of the pervasiveness of the problem. 

But I will conclude that police treat people much nicer on certain streets in New York than on others.  Are some people more deserving of being treated pleasantly and respectfully than others?  Clearly so, and that’s the cop’s simple truth.