The Racial Dilemma in Urban Policing

Venkatesh comments on Engel et al's study about the racial disparities in drug arrest in Seattle WA. The limitations of the article appear in the Discussion section, in which the authors try to move beyond their simple, straightforward, and powerful claim for improved data collection. Their policy discussion is filled mostly with folk sociology about how crime operates in the lives of everyday urbanites--their speculations fail to draw on the bounty of ethnographic and historical research on the subject. In general, the authors are struggling with a basic empirical fact that confronts every social scientist who studies criminality: Namely, minorities are given disproportionate treatment (of both an unfavorable and an amplified nature) by the criminal justice system. In a purely legal sense, there is no evidence to conclude that Seattle police are racist. However, critics are probably correct in suggesting that the city's law enforcement agencies have not treated minorities fairly. From their own data, Blacks seem to be arrested at higher rates than Whites, and policing practices are the subject of much criticism, although perhaps less so than in other urban regions.