Mississippi race, arrest rates examined
Across the nation, numbers are showing that more black people are arrested than any other race, even outnumbering by percentage the black population in most areas.
FBI census data shows that Mississippi is no different. Of course the number of arrests among blacks is high in places like Jackson where the number of black residents is higher, but the numbers seem to be across the board. Even in the communities where whites are by far the majority, the number of arrests in the black community is still higher.
After the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren White in a situation still being analyzed by a grand jury, public scrutiny has fallen on questions of whether police might actually target minorities. Police in Ferguson arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races.
Mississippi Law Enforcement Training Academy executive director Pat Cronin said Mississippi officers "absolutely, positively" do not leave their training with any gray area about whether it is acceptable to focus on minorities for any reason.
"Law enforcement officers don't target anyone, we go wherever called, regardless of ethnicity and racial makeup or anything else," he said.
While it could be police profiling, it could also be a result of the socioeconomic and educational gaps between the races in so much of the country, which tend to influence crime rates.
"That does not mean police are discriminating. But it does mean it's worth looking at. It means you might have a problem, and you need to pay attention," University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, a leading expert on racial profiling, told USA Today.
Officials said what people forget is that police answer calls that come in from the public. Most arrests are made as a result of someone having called the police department or sheriff's office for help.
"A vast majority of what we do is complaint-driven. We interject ourselves because someone called us there," Byram Police Chief Luke Thompson said.
"When people choose to break the law and are arrested for that, the numbers we look at are, this many people were arrested for these crimes," said Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson. "We don't screen calls and say, okay, we've locked this many people of that race up, we've got to get some different races. Some people literally think you can do that."
Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey said his officers can't afford to look at race when they're in life and death situations.
"The color doesn't come into play. As far as I'm concerned, we don't care if they're red, white, green, or black, we're going to do our job. There's not a race with it," he said.
Mississippi College Law Professor Matt Steffey described it as a problem "that is much easier to describe than explain."
"The fact that there is an underclass of persons of color is one factor, because chronic poverty and joblessness is a fact that can correlate to crime, and crimes relate to arrests," he said. "There's also no doubt based on discussions with those involved and anecdotal evidence that there are bias in the system. Driving while black isn't a matter of fiction, it's a matter of fact, there's academic research that upholds it."
Thompson said his department has to look at arrest numbers on a daily basis, and has a recruiting program in place to try to build a department that reflects the demographic makeup of their community. While one bad apple can spoil the bunch, he said overall police can't be geared to even consider race in a life and death situation.
"Are there dirty cops out there? I'm sure there are," he said. "But an officer out there in the field faced with the circumstances they're faced with at that moment in time has to make that decision. There's too much going on for race to play a factor."
Johnson said recently a predominantly black community came to his department with a petition, asking for more law enforcement presence to help crack down on crimes in their neighborhood.
"Based on that request, if we go down there and do some checkpoints and patrols, I can tell you the number of arrests and tickets is going to spike in the black community," he said. "If you did that and they just look at the numbers, someone's going to jump up and say, 'There goes the sheriff again.'"
But Steffey pointed out that it is a police officer's prerogative as to what to do once they get to a scene, using as an example the higher drug arrest rate among blacks than whites.
"Even just within drug crime there's a racial disparity that cannot be explained by the rate at which people use drugs. You would expect a greater number to be against white defendants and that's not the case," he said.
In Rankin County, 19 percent of the population is black, but 26 percent of those arrested are. He said a lot of the arrests come from outside the county. Hinds County has a higher blac
"With the retail businesses we have in Flowood and Pearl, people come from all over the state to shoplift," he said. "We book a lot of out-of-county addresses."
Steffey said there are solutions to the arrest discrepancy problem. First, he said, the war on drugs needs to be reworked.
"It kind of plugs young people into a revolving door in the criminal justice system that they lack the resources to stop. We need to see it as a public health problem and not a law enforcement problem," he said. "Secondly, we had an easy opportunity at no cost to the state to extend medicare to many many poor people, mostly of color, and for what appeared to be purely political issues we didn't do that."
Contact Therese Apel at tapel@gannett.com or (601) 961-7236. Follow @TRex21 on Twitter.
A sampling of Mississippi jurisdictions and their arrest numbers:
Byram: black population, 52 percent; black arrests, 54 percent
Rankin County: black population, 19 percent; black arrests, 26 percent.
Madison County: black population, 34 percent; black arrests, 78 percent.
Clinton: black population, 34; black arrests, 74.6 percent.
Brandon: black population, 17; black arrests, 44.7 percent
Ridgeland: black population, 33; black arrests, 65.7 percent
Flowood: black population, 17; black arrests, 47 percent
Hernando: black population, 13; black arrests, 33.6 percent
Petal: black population, 10; black arrests, 22.4 percent
Bay St. Louis: black population, 13; black arrests, 27 percent
Pontotoc: black population, 14; black arrests, 26.5 percent
Lee County: black population, 27; black arrests, 48 percent
Southaven: black population, 22; black arrests, 41 percent
Biloxi: black population, 20; black arrests, 36 percent
George County: black population, 8; black arrests, 17 percent