Numerous studies prove that police are far more likely to take action against black people. In 2018, a study by the Washington Post found that 23% of US citizens killed by police that year had been African American. Yet, this group constitutes just 12% of the country's population. A further study by Stanford tracked the 100 million police traffic stops between 2011 and 2017. Their findings were yet more revelatory, finding that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over. At night this was not the case, as drivers' ethnicity tends to be obscured by darkness. These are just two studies within a giant cannon that prove the police unfairly target nonwhites. This is true even when the race of police officers is controlled for. It is therefore a function of the job and the institution, above all.
The argument
American police have a history of racist beliefs that are still prevalent in today’s police culture.An example of this is that Black men have a 2.5 times higher risk of being killed in their life than white men. A large part of the arrests of African Americans come from nonviolent drug crimes. Even though drug use and sales are quite similar across all ethnic lines in the United States, Black and Hispanic people are much more likely to be arrested and convicted of drug crimes than white people. While these groups are minorities in American society, 57 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses are Hispanic or African American. This discrimination may also be partly caused by the white culture in America. As white citizens are far more likely to call 911 and receive police service, while Black and Hispanic citizens are more likely to be the targets of the police. Even with these statistics, national data from 2015 shows that about 50% of white Americans believe discrimination is just as bad against them as it is against people of color. These beliefs even appear to be “taught” at a very young age, because studies have shown that American children at the age of 5 express the same range of empathy for all ethnicities when shown pictures of both Black and white people being pricked by a pin, but by age 7 they begin to think that the white person feels more pain from the prick. While it is not entirely clear if American police victimize black people implicitly or explicitly, these results show they still do it regardless of intention.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Police do not victimize Black people, because it is an educated decision on their part to stop and arrest more Black people, as they commit more crime. Black people have a higher percentage rate of committing homicide and other violent crimes, as reported by The Red Elephants.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The figures arrive without sources or definitions, and they do different work than the premise assumes. Lifetime risk-of-death estimates vary substantially between studies depending on which database is used and whether all killings by police or only shootings are counted. The prison figure is a composition statistic describing who is incarcerated, not the rate at which comparable conduct leads to arrest — and the argument's strongest evidence, the well-documented gap between similar rates of drug use and very different rates of drug arrest, is stated in a single clause and left unsupported. [Rejecting P2] Differences in who calls for police service and who is stopped are compatible with several explanations, including the geographic concentration of patrols, differences in reporting rates, and the deployment decisions that follow recorded crime. The premise does not distinguish them, and treating the correlation as a demonstration of intent skips the step the argument most needs to make. [Rejecting P3] This premise concerns beliefs held by the public and by children, not conduct by police officers, so it cannot support a conclusion about a police institution, and the finding on perceptions of pain is reported with neither citation nor study design. More fundamentally, "systemic" is a claim about how an institution's rules, incentives and practices generate outcomes irrespective of individual intent — and the case is far stronger built on those mechanisms, such as use-of-force policy, disciplinary and arbitration procedures, arrest and citation targets, civil forfeiture and the funding of departments through fines, than on aggregate disparities alone.