Using a unique data set we link the race of police officers who kill suspects with the race of those who are killed across the United States. We have data on a total of 2,699 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect. For the estimates where we know the race of the officer who killed the suspect, the ratio of the rate that blacks are killed by black versus white officers is large — ranging from 3 to 5 times larger. However, because the media may under report the officer’s race when black offic-ers are involved, other results that account for the fact that a disproportionate number of the un-known race officers may be more reliable. They indicate no statistically significant difference be-tween killings of black suspects by black and white officers. Our panel data analysis that looks at killings at the police department level confirms this. These findings are inconsistent with taste-based racial discrimination against blacks by white police officers. Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.
As you're probably aware, black Americans are arrested for marijuana possession far more frequently than whites. You may also know that there's not much evidence that black people consume marijuana with greater regularity than whites do.
...And this is a uniform phenomenon. It's not that some states treat the races equally and others treat them really unequally. Only in Hawaii are the rates even close to equal, and that's biased by the fact that blacks make up only 1.6 percent of the population. In the state with the second-lowest disparity, Alaska, blacks are 1.6 times more likely to be arrested. In the state with the biggest, Iowa, blacks are 8.34 times more likely to be arrested. D.C. has the second biggest; in the District, blacks are 8.05 times more likely to be arrested.
Do the findings control for which group uses more in public? My experience living in Chicago and Waterloo, Iowa (the "blackest" city in Iowa--http://www.iowadatacenter.org/Publications/aaprofile2016.pdf) suggests that this disparity alone could explain the disparity in arrest rates. It's quite possible that there's a cultural difference in drug abuse that could skew the results.
There are a lot of different questions here, though. This study only addresses one.
There are lots of ways for the system to be racially skewed/biased without being a product of personal bias - so many that I think the focus on "racist police" makes it hard to recognize a lot of easily-provable problems.
Stop-and-frisk is my go-to example of a system that produces bias regardless of the race or biases of the officers involved. In theory, it's an efficient use of limited police resources, it can be implemented race-blind, and it "only catches criminals". There's room to talk about harassment of non-criminals, but at least regarding the people who get arrested its an understandable idea.
In practice, criminality is a product of conviction. Stop-and-frisk mostly catches 'possession' crimes like personal-use drugs and illegal weapons (and since a 3-inch pocketknife is illegal in many cities, we shouldn't mistake this for violent intent). As a result, living in a stop-and-frisk area massively increases your odds of being charged with a low-grade crime - it's not as though carrying marijuana or a Leatherman is rare among un-policed groups. Even if you attempt a crude race-blind implementation, like policing based on neighborhood crime rate, you end up with a vicious cycle where crime rates are high because enforcement is high.
So I think we do a disservice when we limit our discussion and investigation to officer bias. Even when it's not present, it's still easy to build an unequal system.
Do White Police Officers Unfairly Target Black Suspects?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2870189&...
Using a unique data set we link the race of police officers who kill suspects with the race of those who are killed across the United States. We have data on a total of 2,699 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect. For the estimates where we know the race of the officer who killed the suspect, the ratio of the rate that blacks are killed by black versus white officers is large — ranging from 3 to 5 times larger. However, because the media may under report the officer’s race when black offic-ers are involved, other results that account for the fact that a disproportionate number of the un-known race officers may be more reliable. They indicate no statistically significant difference be-tween killings of black suspects by black and white officers. Our panel data analysis that looks at killings at the police department level confirms this. These findings are inconsistent with taste-based racial discrimination against blacks by white police officers. Our estimates examining the killings of white and Hispanic suspects found no differences with respect to the races of police officers. If the police are engaged in discrimination, such discriminatory behavior should also be more difficult when body or other cameras are recording their actions. We find no evidence that body cameras affect either the number of police killings or the racial composition of those killings.