Legal & Courts  September 1, 2020

Ethnic disparities persist in state, U.S. justice system

Racial tension has gripped the nation at levels and in such widespread fashion perhaps not seen since the 1960s. Some of the resulting protests have turned violent, resulting not only in deaths and injuries but also in expensive damage to private businesses and government facilities alike.

A series of recent incidents this year involving police and African-American suspects fueled frustrations that spilled onto U.S. streets this summer, including the death of Elijah McClain in August 2019 after being placed in a police chokehold in Aurora, the killing of African-American George Floyd in May in Minneapolis, and the most recent incident in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in which Jacob Blake was left partially paralyzed after being shot seven times in the back at close range.

One of the roots of the unrest has been statistics that continue to show that arrests of racial minorities are made at rates substantially higher than their proportion of the population. Those  impacts go far beyond the arrest itself into the business world; reduced employment of people with criminal records ends up costing the U.S. economy $78 billion to $87 billion per year, a statistic that recently prompted a bipartisan Congress to pass and President Donald Trump to sign a reauthorization of the Second Chance Act, which promotes successful re-entry for people returning to the community after incarceration.

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Current statistics about arrests and other police interactions are hard to come by because offices are closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but a Colorado Division of Criminal Justice report found that Black people accounted for 12.4% of the arrests and summonses in 2015 even though they represented just 4.2% of the state’s population. Those accusations were more frequently for serious charges, the report found, and that Black juveniles were more likely to end up in youth detention facilities than their counterparts of other ethnicities.

The findings were released after passage of the Community Law Enforcement Action Reporting (CLEAR) Act, which required analysis and reporting of racial data submitted by law-enforcement agencies in Colorado. Subsequent issues have been raised with some CLEAR Act data because most of it is owned on a local level, and local law-enforcement agencies sometimes use different codes and systems to record it.

A national report issued this year by the NAACP contends that a Black person is five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person, a Black man is twice as likely to be stopped without just cause than a Black woman, and 65% of Black adults have felt targeted because of their race, as have 35% of Latino and Asian adults.

The NAACP report underscored that even though more Caucasian people have been killed by police, Black and Hispanic people are disproportionately impacted.  Whites make up slightly more than 60% of the U.S. population but about 41% of fatal police shootings, the report found; it said Black people make up 13.4% of the population but 22% of fatal police shootings — as well as 35% of individuals executed under the death penalty in the past 40 years..

The officer-involved shooting statistics don’t include other fatal non-shooting encounters with police, such as those involving McClain and Floyd.

In Colorado, according to a report released in January by the Colorado Department of Public Safety, Black people were nearly four times as likely as Whites to be shot at by police. Hispanics’ risk was almost twice as high as their Caucasian counterparts, the CDPS report found. That report said 53% of Coloradans shot by police were White, but White people make up 67% of the population. More than half of the shootings by law-enforcement officers in Colorado in the past nine years started with a call for police assistance, it said, followed by traffic stops. The report said three-fourths of the officers involved reported giving a verbal warning before shooting.

According to a 2017 statewide report by the ACLU, one in 28 adult Black males in Colorado were in prison. That report found that Black people make up 4% of the state’s adult population but 18% of the prison population. Latinos make up nearly one-fifth of adult Coloradans, the ACLU report found, but nearly a third of adults in state correctional facilities.

The national NAACP report found that African-Americans and Latinos represent a total of 32% of the U.S. population but 56% of those incarcerated in the nation — a statistic that takes on extra currency given that the five largest known clusters of COVID-19 virus cases are inside correctional institutions.

Racial tension has gripped the nation at levels and in such widespread fashion perhaps not seen since the 1960s. Some of the resulting protests have turned violent, resulting not only in deaths and injuries but also in expensive damage to private businesses and government facilities alike.

A series of recent incidents this year involving police and African-American suspects fueled frustrations that spilled onto U.S. streets this summer, including the death of Elijah McClain in August 2019 after being placed in a police chokehold in Aurora, the killing of African-American George Floyd in May in Minneapolis, and the…

Dallas Heltzell
With BizWest since 2012 and in Colorado since 1979, Dallas worked at the Longmont Times-Call, Colorado Springs Gazette, Denver Post and Public News Service. A Missouri native and Mizzou School of Journalism grad, Dallas started as a sports writer and outdoor columnist at the St. Charles (Mo.) Banner-News, then went to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before fleeing the heat and humidity for the Rockies. He especially loves covering our mountain communities.
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