“A Powerful Legacy”: Positive Steps On Stop And Frisk, Drug Arrests
For all who believe in colorblind justice — and want to see fewer African American and Hispanic men caught up in the system — there are two recent items of good news: a judge’s ruling ordering changes in New York’s “stop-and-frisk” policy and Attorney General Eric Holder’s initiative to keep nonviolent drug offenders out of prison.
First, stop-and-frisk. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is having a hissy fit over U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin’s finding that the policy amounted to “indirect racial profiling.” On his weekly radio show, he wouldn’t even say Scheindlin’s name, calling her “some woman” who knows “absolutely zero” about policing. In an op-ed for The Post, Bloomberg went so far as to accuse Scheindlin of being “ideologically driven.”
If and when Bloomberg calms down, I’d like to ask him the fundamental question posed — not in these words, of course — by Scheindlin’s ruling: Would it kill you to stop and frisk some white guys, too?
Blacks and Hispanics make up about half of New York City’s population but were targeted in 87 percent of the 532,911 “stops” last year under Bloomberg’s policy, which encourages police to detain and search individuals if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person “committed, is committing, or is about to commit” a crime. The reason most often cited for a stop is that the individual made “furtive” movements.
In nine out of 10 cases, the person is stopped — and sometimes frisked — but no evidence is found of any offense. Bloomberg argues that this kind of proactive policing actually prevents crime, and he credits stop-and-frisk for making New York the safest big city in the country.
I’m all for safe streets. I’m also aware that there is no consensus crediting stop-and-frisk with any impact on the crime rate, but I’m willing to accept the premise that an active police presence can deter criminals. My problem is that African Americans and Hispanics are being singled out disproportionately for these arbitrary searches.
Bloomberg says this is because most violent crime occurs in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, with black and Hispanic victims. By all means, police should continue walking and cruising these beats. But the numbers indicate that African Americans and Hispanics are being given too much stop-and-frisk scrutiny — and that whites are being given too little.
According to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union, blacks and Hispanics who are stopped are more likely than whites to be frisked. But just 2 percent of blacks and Hispanics who are frisked are discovered to be carrying weapons, while 4 percent of whites who are frisked have weapons. So if the aim is to find illegal guns, police should frisk more whites.
Why such fuss over a few minutes of inconvenience and indignity? Because blacks and Hispanics who come into contact with the criminal justice system for any reason are more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted than whites and are likely to serve longer prison sentences.
More than 26,000 stops were made last year for alleged marijuana offenses, for example; 61 percent were of African Americans and only 9 percent were of whites. But surveys show that whites are equally or more likely than blacks to be marijuana users. Police don’t find white potheads because they’re not looking for them.
We know that nationwide, according to federal figures, African Americans are four times as likely as whites to be arrested, charged and imprisoned for minor drug offenses. Once young black and Hispanic men enter the criminal justice system, too often they become trapped in a loop of incarceration, release, unemployment and recidivism.
On the national level, Holder has taken direct aim at this vicious cycle with the announcement last week that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders will no longer face federal charges that carry long mandatory prison sentences.
Holder is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors and also supporting legislation that has received bipartisan support in the Senate, where some conservatives now see excessive prison terms as a waste of money.
“We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate, not merely to warehouse and to forget,” Holder said in a speech to the American Bar Association. President Obama is expected to make prison reform one of his priorities this fall.
Ending the presumption that African American and Hispanic men are beyond redemption would be a powerful legacy for the first black president and the first black attorney general to leave behind.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 19, 2013
“Just Secede Already!”: Texas Asks Court To Nuke The Voting Rights Act, Forever
When the Supreme Court dismantled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last June, there were two small silver linings in this decision. The first was the possibility that Congress could revive the regime killed by the Court, where states with particularly poor records of racialized voter suppression must “preclear” their voting practices with the Justice Department or a federal court before those practices can take effect. The second potential silver lining is Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows a state to be brought back under the preclearance requirement if a court finds that it engaged in “violations of the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment justifying equitable relief.”
Now, however, Texas wants to destroy these two silver linings as well. And there is a fair chance that the conservative Supreme Court will allow them to do so.
Late last month, the Justice Department joined a Section 3 lawsuit claiming that federal supervision of Texas’ election practices should be reinstated in light of very recent examples of intentional race discrimination by Texas. Among other things, a federal court found that Texas “consciously replaced many of [a] district’s active Hispanic voters with low-turnout Hispanic voters in an effort to strengthen the voting power of [the district’s] Anglo citizens.” These, the Justice Department explained, were “violations of the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment” justifying federal supervision.
Texas’ response to the Justice Department does not simply reject the idea that it should be subject to preclearance, it calls upon the courts to declare virtually any preclearance regime unconstitutional. According to Texas, the Supreme Court’s decision hobbling the Voting Rights Act “threw out Congress’s reauthorization of a preclearance regime because the legislative record failed to show ‘anything approaching the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that faced Congress in 1965, and that clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions from the rest of the Nation at that time.’” In other words, Texas wants a federal court order saying that any effort to reinstate the Voting Rights Act in Texas is unconstitutional unless Texas transforms into Mississippi at the height of the Jim Crow era.
And they may very well succeed in getting this order. While Texas’ theory cannot be squared with the text of the Fifteenth Amendment — which provides that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and gives Congress “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation” — it is not that hard to square with the Supreme Court’s recent decision. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion does indeed contain language suggesting that only something “approaching the ‘pervasive,’ ‘flagrant,’ ‘widespread,’ and ‘rampant’ discrimination that faced Congress in 1965″ can permit a preclearance regime now. The fact that this language flies in the face of the Constitution is not likely to bother the five conservative justices who already signed onto it once.
As a final act of chutzpah, Texas also claims that it cannot be subject to preclearance because “Hispanic citizens in Texas registered to vote at higher rates” than Hispanics in other states not subject to federal supervision under the Voting Rights Act. That very well be true, but it’s also besides the point. The thrust of the Justice Department’s lawsuit is that Texas intentionally drew its district lines so that white votes would count more and Hispanic votes would count less. In other words, the whole purpose of these lines was to make sure that it didn’t matter if Hispanic voters registered at high rates because their voting power would still be diluted by gerrymandering. It’s like a basketball referee claiming that it doesn’t matter that he’s not counting all the points scored by one team because that team is taking more shots.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, August 9, 2013
“Republicans, All Talk, No Action”: No House Alternative, No Conference Committee, No Attempt At Finding Common Ground
Without a hint of humor or shame, the Republican National Committee issued a press release this morning accusing President Obama of being “All Talk, No Action” when it comes to the “Hispanic Community.” No, seriously, that’s what the RNC said.
Someone at the RNC’s communications office probably should have thought this one through a little more, since, when it comes to issues important to Latino voters, it’s the lack of “action” from congressional Republicans that’s proving to be so problematic.
Indeed, when it comes to comprehensive immigration reform, which is facing long odds in the face of fierce opposition from the House GOP, the question is whether these Republican lawmakers are prepared to do anything on the issue. National Review‘s Jonathan Strong reports they may not (via Greg Sargent).
Speaker John Boehner wants to pass a series of small bills dealing with immigration reform piece by piece, but it’s not clear whether 218 votes, the required number for passage, will be there for any of them.
Top Democrats are already signaling they’ll oppose the various bills being prepared by the GOP leadership, and conservative Republicans, especially, are wary. Many Republicans will prefer to simply vote against any bill, even if they agree with elements of the legislation, just to prevent Boehner from going to conference with the Senate. Such a conference, many conservatives fear, could lead to a consensus bill that includes amnesty.
When it comes to the future of the policy, this is obviously important. House Republican leaders don’t intend to consider the bipartisan Senate bill, but they also don’t want to do nothing. Boehner & Co. figure they can at least put a positive face on failure by instead taking up elements of immigration reform piecemeal.
But Strong, whose sourcing among Republicans on Capitol Hill is excellent, is reporting that rank-and-file House Republicans aren’t even willing to go this far. Indeed, they’ll even oppose measures they like for fear that they’ll go to a conference committee and become slightly more progressive after negotiations with the Senate Democratic majority.
It’s easier, they figure, to just kill every element of immigration reform and hope the electoral consequences aren’t too severe.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a good reason for that. This is the strategy outlined just last week by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and National Review editor Rich Lowry — two of the most influential Republican voices in media — who co-signed an editorial urging House Republicans to put “a stake through” immigration reform’s “heart.”
More specifically, they urged GOP lawmakers should do literally nothing on the issue — no House alternative, no conference committee, no attempt at finding “common ground.”
It appears the advice was well received.
And so this once again puts the Speaker in an awkward position, as it sinks in that many in his own caucus prefer inaction — and he’s already committed to the so-called “Hastert Rule” that effectively gives these far-right House members a veto power over which bills reach the floor.
What was that the RNC was saying about “All Talk, No Action”?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 16, 2013
“Make Peace With God”: Embattled Federal Judge Called For Texas To Execute 8 To 12 Times As Many Inmates Per Year
According to a complaint filed last week against federal appellate Judge Edith Jones, Jones suggested that African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed towards violent crime and that the death penalty is a public service because it allows inmates to “make peace with God.” Should these allegations against Judge Jones be proven, they will be only the latest examples of a career’s worth of nonchalance regarding executions. Indeed, as far back as 1990, a much younger Jones proposed a series of reforms to Texas’ execution procedures that would have increased that state’s execution rate by as much as twelve times.
In an article for the Texas Bar Journal entitled “Death Penalty Procedures: A Proposal for Reform,” which is available through the legal research service HeinOnline, Jones decries a capital punishment system in Texas which she views as too inefficient, in large part because judges delay executions by taking time to review death sentences to determine that they were lawfully handed down. Indeed, at one point Jones blames the slow rate of executions on “the frequent, human reaction of most judges . . . to defer a decision if any element of a case raises doubts, or to grant a temporary stay for further consideration.”
To speed along Texas’ ability to kill death row inmates, Jones proposes that Texas schedule “four to six executions per month, commencing six months to one year from the date” those execution dates are made public. Notably, in the five years prior to when Jones wrote this piece, Texas executed an average of just under six inmates per year, so the immediate impact of her proposal would have been to multiply the state’s execution rate eight to twelvefold.
It’s also worth noting that Texas’ execution rate did spike significantly in the years after Jones wrote this piece. Most significantly, during the four years after Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which limited the ability of death row inmates to challenge their sentences in federal court, Texas executed an average of 33 people per year. Nevertheless, in the modern era of American death penalty law, Texas has never executed the 48 to 72 people per year suggested by Jones’ piece. The deadliest year for Texas inmates was 2000, when 40 people were executed. 15 people were executed last year. Nevertheless, Jones concludes her list of proposals for expediting Texas’ executions by suggesting they could be viewed as “too lenient” because they would “take more than four years to conclude all the currently pending capital cases.”
A decade after publishing this proposal, Jones joined two opinions claiming that a man whose attorney slept through much of his trial could nonetheless be executed.
Even without Jones’ proposal for a wave of executions, Texas has a higher execution rate than any other state. More than one third of all U.S. executions took place in Texas since 1976, when the Supreme Court announced the modern constitutional regime governing death penalty cases.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, June 10, 2013
“A Finger In The Eye Of Hispanic Voters”: House GOP Dream Act Deferral Vote Is Political Insanity
Honestly, when I saw that House Republicans had passed an amendment today which would defund President Obama’s limited, executive-order-driven Dream Act, my first thought was to wonder what the GOP is thinking. Does this party have a death wish?
This isn’t the political equivalent of rocket science. Hispanics voted overwhelmingly to support Obama last year. And given demographic trends regarding the share of the electorate they’re going to make up in coming years, neither party can afford to become noncompetitive with these voters. It’s a matter of political survival. And many Republicans know this – see the Republican National Committee’s 2012 post-mortem, for example, or the College Republicans’ recent version.
Immigration is not the number one issue for Hispanic voters, but it is a gateway issue and one that gets to tone and outlook. If voters think a party is hostile to and/or distrustful of them, they’re going to tune that party out. So rational Republicans (not to mention a whole lot of their corporate backers) want to get immigration reform done.
But today’s GOP – especially its House denizens – aren’t about rationality. So they cast the vote they did today. And it’s not an isolated occurrence. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta looks at how the GOP is trying to blow its 2016 chances:
House Republicans walking away from comprehensive immigration reform. Tying a path to citizenship to continued second-class standing on access to health insurance. Voting to resume deporting undocumented immigrants brought here as children, a year after President Obama issued an executive order instructing the Department of Homeland Security to use discretion and make such deportations a low priority.
And this isn’t simply bad policy or stumbling into bad politics. This is going out of their way to charge into bad politics. It’s not like there’s any chance this amendment becomes law. So why make a point of voting for it?
I was at a press breakfast yesterday with Rep. Tom Price, the Georgia Republican who is vice chairman of the House Budget Committee, and he was asked about whether the GOP would suffer politically if it is blamed for killing immigration reform this year. Price, who favors the House GOP’s official approach of going piecemeal on immigration reform rather than trying to tackle it comprehensively, made a couple of enlightening comments.
First, he said that “I think what the American people want is to see individuals working to solve challenges.” I tend to think that what the American people actually want is to see their elected representatives actually solving challenges rather than simply trying – this isn’t kindergarten: You don’t get points for trying really hard; you get points for getting stuff done.
The second thing he said was that legislation with a path to citizenship or a path to legal status wouldn’t pass the House with a majority of Republican votes because the GOP doesn’t trust “the administration to enforce the current laws that are on the books as they relate to much of immigration.” But he then went on to conflate the views of his party and its base with the broader electorate: “The American people don’t trust Washington in this area because the promise that was made in 1986 has been broken,” he said, referring to the deal President Ronald Reagan signed which provided amnesty for illegal immigrants back then in exchange for promises of border security. “There’s no trust at all. The first step in regaining that trust is living up to the promise that was made to the nation back in 1986 and that is controlling and securing the border.”
Two points. First, the border is far more secure than it has been. Second, if mistrust of Washington was as widespread as Price seems to suppose, polls would show deep opposition to both comprehensive immigration reform and a way for currently illegal immigrants to gain citizenship, but poll after poll shows otherwise. A recent poll conducted for Bloomberg showed that 74 percent of adults favor “Allowing immigrants living in the country illegally to become citizens, provided they don’t have criminal records, they pay fines and back taxes, and they wait more than 10 years.” That’s hardly angry mistrust of Washington regarding immigration.
The problem is that House Republicans either confuse their base’s wishes or simply don’t want to cross them. Either way, they’re voting themselves a path to oblivion.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 7, 2013
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