U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has issued new directives to his U.S. attorneys in the field to use prosecutorial discretion and stop pursuing low-level drug possession cases that carry high minimum mandatory prison sentences.
While state prison populations are finally slowly going down, the federal prison system continues to grow with non-violent drug convictions. Also, Judge Shira Scheindlin, a federal district judge in New York, has ruled that New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy was clearly biased in stopping Black and Latino people out of proportion to the initial behaviors that made police instigate their searches. Thousands of innocent young Black and Latino men were being prejudged by the police, losing their Constitutional rights and liberties based more on their race than on evidence.
These two events will give extra meaning to the upcoming March on Washington, taking place to renew the national conversation sparked 50 years ago by the March for Jobs and Justice in 1963. There was already a renewed sense about the march because of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act and by the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. Attorney General Holder and Judge Scheindlin are moving the country in the right direction to discuss the racial implications of policies. And, there are dots connecting Trayvon Martin to Holder’s actions to Scheindlin’s ruling.
There are real costs to any action. And the implications of policies that are not rational have costs for everyone. The need to discuss race is not just one of justice — though justice is the fabric of any sustainable society. Scheindlin’s ruling points to the cavalier attitude of New York City’s leadership in a policy that was inefficient, and therefore, costly. A stated purpose of the stop-and-frisk policy was to reduce violent crime and get guns off the streets of New York and out of the hands of criminals.
Yet the data from the police searches clearly indicated that police were more likely to find weapons when they stopped and frisked Whites than Blacks or Latinos. So, all the thousands of times and hours police occupied themselves detaining young Black and Latino men were the thousands of hours the real criminals were free to go unnoticed. Yet, blinded by their own view of race and crime, the police ignored their own statistics and defiantly challenged the ruling of Scheindlin in a press conference, calling her ill-informed.
What most disturbed the Black community in the ruling of the Trayvon Martin case was a similar issue. A young Black man, walking alone, quietly talking on a cell phone, minding his own business and eating Skittles candy was profiled, followed and stalked by a civilian neighborhood watch volunteer. Though Martin was not engaged in any suspicious activity, other than that he was Black and a young man walking through the neighborhood.
The decision to cavalierly excuse his murder reflects a value on Martin’s life that underlies the defiance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City police that Black men do not have a value in society. Martin was disposable. And the interrupted lives of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Black and Latino men stopped by the New York police have no value. In the big equation, Martin can be disposed, and thousands of lives can be affected because society’s sense of safety outweighs the logic of the evidence of innocence on the part of Black and Latino men.
