The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/race-and-equity/page/2/)
Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison announced Wednesday the promotion of Col. Sheree Briscoe, who will be the first African American woman to be deputy commissioner and the first to oversee the department’s day-to-day operations.
Commentators argue that African Americans in law enforcement can play a primary role in tackling the historic legacy of police racism. But first they have to get in the door. In interviews with The Crime Report, senior Black officers say police recruitment practices are riddled with both overt and implicit bias.
Veteran St. Louis Officer Lt. Col. Troy Doyle was the favored candidate to become the city’s first Black police chief, but the county’s Board of Police Commissioners picked a white officer. Now Doyle has launched a lawsuit claiming the decision was influenced by corporate donors opposed to appointing an African American.
A former captain with the Birmingham Police Department writes that some police have lost touch with the core responsibility of crime prevention, and instead have “created criminals” out of “low hanging fruit” to keep numbers high for traffic stops. Unfortunately, this leads to an entanglement with the justice system stemming from poverty and race.
The president’s 11 federal judicial nominees include three Black women and the first Muslim, New Jersey judge Zahid Quraishi.
In the wake of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, law enforcement agencies are facing criticism for not having enough Asian-American officers on staff to adequately investigate cases. A 2016 report found only 7 percent of the Seattle Police Department’s sworn officers were Asian American, but they comprised 14 percent of Seattle’s population.
A recent study published in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity about shooting victims in Chicago found Black people killed in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city in 2016 received roughly half as much news coverage as white people killed in majority white neighborhoods, and were less likely to be discussed as “multifaceted, complex people.”
After crunching the data, researchers found victims in all three groups tend to share similar demographics.
Mario González, the husband of Delaina Ashley Yaun, one of the eight victims of the Atlanta spa attacks, does not know why he was held for so long or treated so poorly, but he thinks it might be because he’s Mexican.
The New Jersey State Police force has a dark past characterized by racial prejudice — a past that hasn’t quite disappeared, as a criminal justice assistant professor and researcher tasked with researching the history of the force recently discovered.