Discriminatory criminal justice policies and practices have historically and unjustifiably targeted black people since the Reconstruction Era, including Black Codes, vagrancy laws, and convict leasing, all of which were used to continue post-slavery control over newly-freed people.

› This discrimination continues today in often less overt ways, including through disparity in the enforcement of seemingly race-neutral laws. For example, while rates of drug use are similar across racial and ethnic groups, black people are arrested and sentenced on drug charges at much higher rates than white people.

› Bias by decision makers at all stages of the justice process disadvantages black people. Studies have found that they are more likely to be stopped by the police, detained pretrial, charged with more serious crimes, and sentenced more harshly than white people.

› Living in poor communities exposes people to risk factors for both offending and arrest, and a history of structural racism and inequality of opportunity means that black people are more likely to be living in such conditions of concentrated poverty.

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› Studies on police use of force reveal that black people are more likely than white people to experience use of force by police. A study of police use of non-fatal force from 2002 to 2011 found that in street stops, 14 percent of black people experienced non-fatal force compared to 6.9 percent of white people stopped by the police.57 › Studies have found that police are more likely to pull over and search black drivers despite lower contraband hit rates. In a study of investigatory traffic stops in Kansas City among drivers under 25 years old, 28 percent of black men and 17 percent of black women were pulled over in 2011 for an investigatory stop, compared to 13 percent of white men and 7 percent of white women.58 In 2016, a Police Accountability Task Force in Chicago found that police searched black and Latino drivers four times as often as white drivers. However, police found contraband on white drivers twice as often as black and Latino drivers.59 In a similar study in 2017 at Stanford University, researchers developed a “threshold test” to quantify how officers initiate searches. The study found that police in North Carolina employ a lower search threshold to black and Latino people than they do to white people and Asian people, searching 5.4 percent of black people pulled over compared to 3.1 percent of white people.60

https://www.vera.org/publications/for-the-record-unjust-burden