Your sister comes home from spending the evening with her friends, slams the front door and runs to her room while crying.

You are giving a speech in front of an audience and notice several people laughing and pointing at something on your pants.

You see a man running and frantically waving at a bus that is pulling away from a bus stop.

For example, if you go over to a friend's house and they point at the sofa and say, "Don't sit there; Candy came over with her baby again," what could you logically conclude? First, you know there must be a reason not to sit where your friend is pointing. Further, you know that the reason to not sit there is related to the fact that Cindy just visited with her baby. You don't know what exactly happened, but you can infer enough and don't need to ask any more questions to know that you do not want to sit there.

An inference is a conclusion you reach by applying logic to the evidence you are given.

such as interviewing someone or surveying a group of people, you are reading. You are 'reading' the subjects’ ideas and views on the topic you are investigating.

According to figures from the National Registry of Exonerations (NER) black people are about five times more likely to go to prison for drug possession than white people. According to exoneration data, black people are also 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes.

data from New York City showed that black people are arrested for marijuana at eight times the rate of white people. In Manhattan, it’s 15 times as much.

A 2020 ACLU report found that even in the era of marijuana reform, black people are more than 3½ times more likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses than whites.

Black people are consistently arrested, charged and convicted of drug crimes including possession, distribution and conspiracy at far higher rates than white people. This, despite research showing that both races use and sell drugs at about the same rate.

traffic violations in several Bay Area counties in California found that black and Latino drivers were significantly more likely to be jailed for an inability to pay petty fines for moving violations. White drivers on average were half as likely to be booked for failure to pay, while black drivers were up to 16 times more likely to be jailed over traffic fines. Another study found that black people make up just 6 percent of the population of San Francisco, but more than 70 percent of those seeking legal aid due to driver’s license suspensions over unpaid traffic fines.

A 2017 Chicago Tribune investigation found that as the city ramped up its ticketing of bicyclists, black neighborhoods received more than twice as many citations as white and Latino neighborhoods. A year later, black neighborhoods were getting three times more bicycle tickets than white neighborhoods.

95 million traffic stops by 56 police agencies between 2011 and 2018 found that while black people were much more likely to be pulled over than whites, the disparity lessens at night, when police are less able to distinguish the race of the driver.

A national study of misdemeanor arrests published in 2018 in the Boston University Law Review found that the “black arrest rate is at least twice as high as the white arrest rate for disorderly conduct, drug possession, simple assault, theft, vagrancy, and vandalism. The black arrest rate for prostitution is almost five times higher than the white arrest rate, and the black arrest rate for gambling is almost ten times higher.”

A 2019 study of 11,000 police stops over about four weeks in the District found that while black people make up 46 percent of the city’s population, they accounted for 70 percent of police stops, and 86 percent of stops that didn’t involve traffic enforcement.

2013 and 2018, black men were about 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police, and that black men have a 1-in-1,000 chance of dying at the hands of police. Black women were 1.4 more times likely to be killed than white women. Latino men were 1.3 to 1.4 times more likely to be killed than white men. Latino women were between 12 percent and 23 percent less likely to be killed than white women.

An October 2019 report in the Los Angeles Times found that during traffic stops, “24% of black drivers and passengers were searched, compared with 16% of Latinos and 5% of whites.” The same study also found that police were slightly more likely to find drugs, weapons or other contraband among whites.

receiving end

A New York Times examination after the death of George Floyd found that while black people make up 19 percent of the Minneapolis population and 9 percent of its police, they were on the receiving end of 58 percent of the city’s police use-of-force incidents.

So 97 percent-plus of these people are getting punished solely because they belong to a group that statistically commits some crimes at a higher rate.

there is a running joke in law enforcement when it comes to racial profiling: It never happens . . . and it works.

There are problems here that are inextricable from race. And there are problems that aren’t directly related to race. But even the latter set of problems tend to be exacerbated when you factor race into the equation.

exacerbated

inextricable

Finally, none of this is to say that race is the only thing we need to worry about in the criminal justice system. Certainly, lots of white people are wrongly accused, arrested and convicted. Lots of white people are treated unfairly, beaten and unjustifiably shot and killed by police officers. White people too are harmed by policies such as mandatory minimums, asset forfeiture, and abuse of police, prosecutorial and judicial power.

Policing and profilingMisdemeanors, petty crimes and driver’s license suspensionsThe drug warJuries and jury selectionThe death penaltyProsecutors, discretion and plea bargainingJudges and sentencingSchool suspensions and the school-to-prison pipelinePrison, incarceration and solitary confinementBail, pretrial detention, commutations and pardons, gangs and other issuesThe dissent — contrarian studies on race and the criminal-justice system

it’s pretty clear to me that the evidence of racial bias in our criminal justice system isn’t just convincing — it’s overwhelming.

Of particular concern to some on the right is the term “systemic racism,” often wrongly interpreted as an accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them. When you consider that much of the criminal justice system was built, honed and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone, conservatives included, will concede rife with racism — this is pretty intuitive. The modern criminal justice system helped preserve racial order — it kept black people in their place. For much of the early 20th century, in some parts of the country, that was its primary function. That it might retain some of those proclivities today shouldn’t be all that surprising.

I’ve attempted below to catalog the evidence. The list below isn’t remotely comprehensive. And if you know of other studies, please send them to me. I would like to make this piece a repository for this issue.

proclivities

concede rife

disparate

The thing is, most people of color have a similar story or know someone who does. Yet, there’s a deep skepticism on the right of any assertion that the criminal justice system is racially biased. In early August 2018, National Review editor and syndicated columnist Rich Lowry wrote a column disputing the notion that our system is racist. Andrew Sullivan wrote something similar in New York magazine. (Interestingly, both Lowry and Sullivan cite criminologist John Pfaff to support their positions. Pfaff has since protested on Twitter that both misinterpreted what he wrote.) And attempting to refute the notion that the system is racist has become a pretty regular beat for conservative crime pundit Heather Mac Donald.

there was little objection or protest from the right.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)

He added that a black senior-level staffer had experienced the same thing and had even downgraded his car in the hope of avoiding the problem.

overwhelming evidence