Minority Arrests and Predictive Policing Essay

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noticeable gap when it comes to criminal-justice statistics, specifically police and their use of lethal force. Although statistics exist for several things like arson and homicides, there are no official and reliable tabulation of law enforcement-caused civilian deaths. The Washington Post mentioned in one of their articles, that almost 400 police killings occurred in one year. While this is at least an estimated figure versus unknown, James Comey, an FBI Director confessed he did not know how many of these killing occur every day, every month, or every year. There are just no efforts to collect such data.

Statistics such as these are important. Statistics play an important role in focusing the attention of politicians, defining the public debate, as well as driving the allocation of resources. The work of public officials is often assessed by how these statistics decrease or increase based on the efforts of such public officials. When people cannot access statistics of certain things, like police killings, such activity will go largely unchanged leading to scenarios where police violence on civilians may increase or become worse as time progresses. Statistics force the public to acknowledge what is being done and what may be done to change it.

Other gaps exist in the American prison system when it comes to solitary confinement and non-sexual assaults. Without this data, researchers cannot understand and study the American criminal-justice system. Furthermore, the public perceptions of inmates may also be warped thanks to being uninformed on the true incidences that occur within the system. While knowing these kinds of statistics can be helpful, they can also be hurtful in the sense that people may become aware of police violence and may assume all police are a certain way, when the reality is, it is just a small percentage. However, knowledge is power and keeping the public and researchers informed is the best thing to do.

2. In a Washington Post article, fatal police shooting in 2015 are discussed and the figures are decidedly higher the previously reported figures over the past decade. Just five months into the 2015-year and 385 people were reported shot by police. By not keeping track of the number of police shooting occurring annually, law enforcement has ignored the growing problem of police-related violence. National debate has argued on the topic of police use of deadly force with particular emphasis on such use on minorities.

This is because as figures revealed, even though half police shooting victims are white, and the other half minority, when looking at unarmed victims, two-thirds of the people killed were Hispanic or black. In fact, blacks were killed by police three times more than white or other minorities. These statistics show the prejudice of police force towards blacks and perhaps the increased violence towards blacks when it comes to suspected offenses.

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The findings the article discusses concerning police shooting revealed a lot. From gender to age, and even number of death in a state. However, one thing that could improve the statistics could be neighborhood locations. People within certain neighborhoods often do not have as many police around as other neighborhoods. For example, an upper-middle class suburb will not have as many police as a working-class urban neighborhood. It would useful to see how many people are shot in these areas as police may react differently in certain neighborhoods due to income level and potential lawsuits. People with money have the resources to sue for wrongful death over those who have lower incomes.

3. Anne Milgrim discusses in her speech the negative effects of little to know criminal statistics availability. She used Camden as an example and stated many of the cases she was able to pull figures from were from low-level drug crimes. When law enforcement in Camden had to deal with robberies and homicides, they essentially used post-it notes in order to determine what was happening in the area. Most of the time these higher-level crimes would go unpunished as they could not find suspects. As statistics and statistical analysis was brought into investigations, the murder rate went down 41% and Camden, NJ was taken off the list as the most dangerous city in the United States in relation to crime. By using data and analytics, law enforcement could surmise where crimes would occur most frequently and understand the proportion of arrests being made, which unfortunately leaned heavily towards low-level drug crimes versus violent crimes. This essentially wastes taxpayer money and creates an environment where many criminals re-offend.

This leads into the most important "takeaway" messages. The idea that privatization of prisons is leading to higher arrest rates for low-level crimes and the wasteful spending of the government on incarcerations. If law enforcement focused on the important aspect of criminal justice such as political corruption, violent crimes, and homicides, the streets would be a lot safer for the general public. By continually incarcerating people for low-level drug charges, it creates an environment for re-offending and these convicted criminals may graduate from low-level crimes to trafficking, murder, and violence.

One potential downside to using something like crime statistics and analytical tools is the chance that certain groups may be targeted more heavily. For example, because black males are frequently incarcerated more than white males, they may become higher targets for law enforcement in terms of suspected criminal activity. The reality is, many of these arrests were done for drugs and often these men are simply being arrested in order to meet quotas. Statistics garnered from….....

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