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Baltimore officials said today they share residents' frustration with the lack of answers for why Freddie Gray, whose family says he was injured during his arrest last week by Baltimore police, died Sunday.

"This is a very, very tense time for Baltimore city," Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said at a news conference this afternoon. "And I understand the community's frustration. I understand it because I'm frustrated. I'm angry that we are here again. That we have had to tell another mother that their child is dead.

"I'm frustrated that not only that we're here but we don't have all of the answers."

Rawlings-Blake complimented the city's "peaceful demonstrations" and added that officials are "moving as quickly as possible to determine exactly how his death occurred." The six officers involved are suspended with pay, as per policy, according to Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.

Officials agreed with the family that Gray suffered a spinal injury but don't how or when.

Gray "clung to life for seven days" before he died Sunday, according to his family's attorney.

Gray was a "healthy" man when he was "chased" by police last Sunday "without any evidence he had committed a crime," William Murphy Jr., an attorney for Gray's family, said.

Baltimore police said Gray, 25, had been trying to flee from officers.

Gray "fled unprovoked upon noticing police presence" and was apprehended after a brief foot chase, according to the charging document.

"This officer noticed a knife clipped to the inside of his front right pants pocket. The defendant was arrested without force or incident. The knife was recovered," the charging document said.

But Mayor Rawlings-Blake said today, "We know that having a knife is not necessarily a crime. It is not necessarily probable cause to chase someone. So we still have questions."

Cellphone video appeared to capture Gray screaming as officers dragged him to a police van.

"His take-down and arrest without probable cause occurred under a police video camera, which taped everything including the police dragging and throwing Freddie into a police vehicle while he screamed in pain," Murphy said in a statement to ABC News.

The charging document also states that during transport, Gray suffered a medical emergency and was immediately transported to Shock Trauma.

"I know that when Mr. Gray was placed inside that van, he was able to talk and he was upset," Baltimore Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said at today's news conference. "And when Mr. Gray was taken out of that van, he could not talk and he could not breathe."

Gray did request medical attention, Rodriguez confirmed, but police are now trying to determine at what time. "I am deeply troubled by this," Rodriguez said.

Police say a police vehicle was requested for transport and Gray asked for an inhaler.

The driver then believed Gray was acting "irate" in the back, police said. Police stopped the vehicle and placed him in leg irons. The van driver then asked for an additional unit to check on Gray, according to police.

Deputy Police Commissioner Rodriguez said "part of what our investigation will do is identify exactly what was going on ... what was said by Gray ... what was relayed by officers ... what actions we did take or should've taken."

"What we don't have at this point is how Mr. Gray sustained those injuries," he said today, when an autopsy was being conducted.

Family lawyer Murphy said, "While in police custody, his spine was 80 percent severed at his neck. He lapsed into a coma, died, was resuscitated, stayed in a coma and last Monday, underwent extensive surgery at Shock Trauma to save his life."

The police department will conclude its investigation by next Friday, May 1, they said, and then the investigation will go to the Baltimore State's Attorney to decide whether charges will be filed.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is considering opening an investigation into Gray's death, sources told ABC News.

ABC News' Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.

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Mayor 'Angry' About Man's Unexplained Death After Arrest

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Baltimore officials said today they share residents' frustration with the lack of answers for why Freddie Gray, whose family says he was injured during his arrest last week by Baltimore police, died Sunday. "This is a very, very tense time for Baltimore city," Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said at a news conference this afternoon.

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not just freddie gray: suspects dying in police custody - cnn

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Not just Freddie Gray: Suspects dying in police custody - CNN

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After a questionable encounter with Baltimore police, Freddie Gray somehow suffered a severe spinal cord injury. He wavered in and out of a coma and died.

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The story of violent black protest in the U.S. is an old one - it's self-destructive but it sometimes gets results.

Posted on August 25, 2014, at 5:32 p.m. ET

The nightly protests in Ferguson, Mo., are receding. Sparked by the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson, the scenes of protest, rioting, and an ironfisted police crackdown emerging from the St. Louis suburb shocked the world. But they shouldn't.

From the Civil War through the early 1900s, what we now call "race riots" were expressions of white rage. Often spurred by labor strife, rumors of a crime committed against a white person, or fears of black families moving into primarily white areas, whites would set entire black neighborhoods to the flame, destroying property and murdering blacks at will.

That changed in Harlem in March 1935, when a black teenager named Lino Rivera attempted to steal a knife from a store on 125th Street. Rivera was caught by the manager, Jackson Smith. When the police came, they took Rivera to the back of the store to avoid a crowd that had gathered outside, but rumors began to spread that Rivera had been beaten or killed. When police refused to let the crowd see the boy, the incident took on a primal echo of the terror that Harlem's black residents had come north to escape. Someone in the crowd threw something that shattered the store's front window.

Alarmed, police attempted to disperse the crowd, arresting speakers and pulling one down from a lamppost in the middle of a speech for "unlawful assemblage" - a phrase that in Ferguson came crackling out of a police loudspeaker as a prologue to the launching of tear gas - which merely enraged the crowd further. The fires set in Harlem on March 19, 1935, would burn for two days, as thousands of blacks took to the streets clashing with police, looting stores, leaving businesses in ruins and several people dead.

A report commissioned by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia assigned the riot's cause to racial strife and poverty:

This relatively unimportant case of juvenile pilfering would never have taken on the significance which it later took on, had not a fortuitous combination of subsequent events made it the spark which set aflame the smouldering resentments of the city of Harlem against racial discrimination and poverty in the midst of plenty. The insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority.

Anthony Camerano / AP Photo

Lino Rivera, 16, is shown in the W. 122nd St. police station on March

20, 1935, with Lt. S.J. Battle.

Harlem in 1935 would signal a shift in the nature of urban uprisings that would come full circle in the 1960s. Instead of whites massacring blacks, urban race riots evolved into blacks lashing out against symbols of white authority - and fighting for a full citizenship long denied - by targeting property more often than people. Harlem rioted again in 1943 after police officer James Collins shot black soldier Robert Bandy following a confrontation in which Collins attempted to arrest Bandy's mother.

Like the Harlem riots, many 1960s uprisings were sparked by conflict between the community and the police. Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood went up in flames in 1965, after three family members were arrested during a clash with police following a drunk-driving stop. St. Louis fell into chaos that same year after 19-year-old Donnell Dortch was shot and killed as he fled police officer Israel Mason, who said Dortch tried to grab his gun during a traffic stop. Detroit burned for five days in 1967 after police tried to arrest dozens of people during a raid of a speakeasy. "The primary period of black urban uprisings, which was 1963 to 1970, nearly all of them were sparked by confrontations between African-Americans and the police," said Thomas Sugrue, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "Almost every single one."

And the same goes for the two weeks of demonstrations - sometimes featuring calculated violence - that manifested in Ferguson. The recipe for urban riots since 1935 is remarkably consistent and the ingredients are almost always the same: An impoverished and politically disempowered black population refused full American citizenship, a heavy-handed and overwhelmingly white police force, a generous amount of neglect, and frequently, the loss of black life at the hands of the police. Yet we're always surprised at what they cook up.

We have had 80 years of Fergusons. We may have more. Violence - as harmful and self-destructive as it is - sometimes works.

Declan Haun / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

Firefighters kneel amid rubble in the street and spray water from a hose into a burning building during riots in Detroit, late July 1967.

Even though Ferguson is 67% black, five of the town's six council members and the mayor are white, in part due to the fact that Ferguson holds municipal elections in odd years and in the spring rather than the fall, when federal elections are held and turnout is greater. There are only three black police officers on its 53-person force. Nearly 90% of vehicle stops involved black motorists, despite the fact that whites were more likely to possess contraband. According to a report by the nonprofit ArchDefenders, Ferguson police issued three warrants and 1.5 cases per household, and the town's budget is sustained by fines and court fees that make up "the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of $2,635,400."

The people of Ferguson and its surrounding municipalities are well aware that they are used as a revenue stream. "You got lines of black people standing around the block, every first of the month, from one municipality to the other, when you got a family and you trying to pay bills and everything," said Rick Canimore, a protester outside the Ferguson police station.

And the view of the demonstrators on West Florissant Avenue differs sharply from Ferguson's white residents, including Mayor James Knowles, who said, "There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson."

Today, there are fewer Fergusons than there were in the 1960s, but more than is comfortable to acknowledge. Brown was one of four black men in the country to be killed by police in the preceding month, but only in Ferguson did the outcry grow into an uprising. Violence - often self-destructive - has long been an element of U.S. civil rights protests, despite the best efforts of civil rights leadership.

In Ferguson it manifested in late-night looting and the hurling of missiles at police. "The vast majority of people were here for peaceful protest, but some folks there, they were looking for a fight," said Antonio French, the St. Louis alderman whose tweets and Vines initially provided the world with a window into the unrest in Ferguson.

Back in 1968, a report produced by the Kerner Commission - an 11-member panel convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson to get to the heart of a series of violent riots in 1967 - concluded:

White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.

"The police are not merely a 'spark' factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes," the Kerner Commission declared. "The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a 'double standard' of justice and protection - one for Negroes and one for whites." The words sound remarkably modern, considering the protesters in Ferguson who chanted as they marched down West Florissant Avenue, "Who do you serve? Who do you protect?"

The spark in Ferguson was the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson following a confrontation in which Brown's friend Dorian Johnson said Wilson told him and Brown to "get the fuck out of the street." Ferguson police say Wilson acted in self-defense when Brown tried to grab his gun; witnesses have said Brown was trying to surrender. The belief among his supporters that Brown was shot with his hands up inspired a rallying cry in Ferguson and all over the country: "Hands up, don't shoot."

"The way he died, it was so bold, the fact that this unarmed man was shot in broad daylight, not only in the middle of the street but in the middle of an apartment complex for anyone to see," said Patricia Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman from Ferguson. "It was just done with so much audacity, that it sent the message that the police don't even care anymore, that they have complete free reign."

Brown's body was left on the street in his Canfield Green neighborhood, lying in a sun-dried pool of blood for four hours. And for a week, Ferguson police withheld the name of the officer who shot Brown - giving him time to scrub the internet of his social media presences. Then they simultaneously released Darren Wilson's name with a surveillance video and incident report alleging Brown had been involved in the robbery of cigars from a convenience store shortly before his death - against the advice of the Justice Department, which said the material would increase tensions.

Police first said Wilson was unaware of the robbery when he stopped Brown, then backtracked and claimed Wilson connected Brown with the robbery in the midst of the confrontation. Whatever the truth, releasing the video struck many as a crude attempt to justify Brown's death, and it ratcheted up tensions with outraged Ferguson residents.

Many of the protesters in Ferguson don't believe Wilson can be convicted. But they have their hearts set on an indictment, if only because it would mean, in the eyes of their country and their government, that the taking of a black life matters as much as the taking of a white life.

"We will not accept three-fifths justice," Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump declared at Brown's funeral. "We will demand equal justice for Mike Brown Jr."

Police violence as both a catalyst and response is a fundamental feature of American urban uprisings. "A lot of the personal injuries that happened during the riots in the 1960s were as a consequence of law enforcement activities," said Sugrue. "The majority of rioters in American cities in the 1960s weren't killing people, they were targeting stores, and restaurants, or engaging in protests and demonstrations. Most of the casualties, injuries, and deaths in the 1960s were because of the actions of law enforcement officials, whether the police or National Guard."

But if much of America has forgotten the circumstances of earlier urban rebellions and the devastating consequences for the communities in which they took place, the people of Ferguson, whether consciously or unconsciously, tried to anticipate them. When police forced protesters to keep moving in the sweltering Missouri heat, residents pooled their resources and handed out free water to marchers. When the police shot tear gas into the crowd, protesters showed up with gallons of milk. When town officials delayed the start of school, teachers held classes in the public library. When late-night protests descended into bedlam, Ferguson residents woke up early the next morning to clean up the damage.

Radicals such as New Black Panther leader Malik Shabazz, clergy such as Elder Cornelius Moore, and freelance mediators such as Charles Mayo literally placed their bodies in front of demonstrators to prevent thrown bottles or verbal taunts from escalating into full-blown clashes with Ferguson's heavily armed police. The same young black men dismissed as troublemakers or "militants" closed ranks in front of West Florissant Avenue's beleagured businesses, seeking to stop the small minority of protesters who turned to looting. A tiny woman named Sharmale Humphrey, who had walked out on the Ferguson McDonald's during minimum wage protests last year, used her bullhorn to shout down a crowd of young men screaming, "Fuck the police."

Those efforts were not universally appreciated. Fox News accused protesters in Ferguson of "forgetting Martin Luther King Jr.'s message" by "turning to violence." King famously called riots the "language of the unheard," but he also condemned the mayhem in Watts by asking, ''What did Watts accomplish but the death of 34 Negroes and injury to thousands more? What did it profit the Negro to burn down the stores and factories in which he sought employment? The way of riots is not a way of progress, but a blind alley of death and destruction which wreaks its havoc hardest against the rioters themselves.''

Yet the messy truth is that the role of violence in the civil rights movement is more productive than King - or most of us - want to acknowledge. Violence by blacks in black neighborhoods is certainly destructive, but the quiet discipline of the era's nonviolent practitioners has overshadowed the black fury of the civil rights era and the fear it inspired. And King's time was more violent than is often acknowledged, of course. Few possess the pious discipline to remain nonviolent in the face of oppression and physical assault.

Moreover, it was not just sit-ins and marches that finally moved President John F. Kennedy to conclude that federal civil rights legislation was necessary, but a riot - specifically, the 1963 conflagration in Birmingham.

King and other civil rights leaders had successfully pushed for a desegregation agreement in Birmingham during the spring of 1963. The images of the public safety commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor, turning firehoses and dogs on peaceful protesters are now iconic. Recalled less often is the bottle throwing and brick hurling that marred some protests, or the riot that followed the nonviolent marches, after the Ku Klux Klan bombings aimed at King and his allies. The Klan bombed the A.G. Gaston Motel and the home of King's brother A.D. King. Black residents gathered, and when police showed up, the confrontation escalated into open clashes between blacks and police. President Kennedy mobilized federal troops.

Kennedy, pinned between the Democratic Party's Southern segregationists and its integrationist liberal wing, was in a panic, and there seemed to be only one solution: "A bill to outlaw segregation by federal statute promised to resolve a hundred potential Birminghams from El Paso to Baltimore, and the clarity of inescapable tensions drew President Kennedy toward the relief of that single, huge gamble," wrote historian Taylor Branch.

Jerome Smith, a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, said that "unless the white man had something to fear - loss of life or his money - he was not going to give up anything," according to historian Diane McWhorter. McWhorter writes that Smith told Kennedy "the nonviolent revolution was effectively over." Kennedy warned the press that, if civil rights weren't dealt with soon, "worse leaders" would take King's place.

The fear of more violence was part of the catalyst for developing legislation that eventually became the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. "President Kennedy did not send troops to Alabama when dogs were biting black babies. He waited three weeks until the situation exploded. He then sent troops after the Negroes had demonstrated their ability to defend themselves," Malcolm X told reporters at the time. "Kennedy did not urge that Negroes be treated right because it is the right thing to do. Instead he said that if the Negroes aren't well treated the [Nation of Islam] would become a threat."

Express / Archive Photos / Getty Images

A policeman searches a suspect during rioting in the Watts area of Los Angeles, August 1965.

Ultimately, the two weeks of protest that followed Brown's death may require no more explanation than the fact that, as with Lino Rivera, Robert Bandy, or Donnell Dortch, residents saw the possibility of their own friends and family in the lifeless body of Michael Brown.

"Two separate occasions, my nephew and my sons and [my daughter's] boyfriend said they were walking down the street and the police said, 'Get the fuck off the street,' just like they did [with] Mike Brown," said Carmelita Williams, whose sons and nephew used to live in Canfield Green. "My children, my sons, and my nephew could have been Mike Brown."

Protests began the day after the shooting, and in the early hours of that morning, the looting began. Ferguson police, geared up like special forces, responded to each successive clash with rubber bullets, pellets filled with pepper spray, wooden slugs, and tear gas. As before, rather than pacify the crowd, the police response seemed to only fuel the community's rage over Brown's death.

"I think clearly it was the local police department escalating the situation," said French. "They took a very heavy-handed approach in the early days. They militarized the situation; it was a case of crowd control and they brought out the heavy guns. Whether you're talking about the incident that started this off, which was the Michael Brown killing, or you're talking about the first few days of the protest, it just shows how the local police departments here overreact when it comes to African-Americans."

Much has been made of Ferguson's angry young black men, tattooed, with their pants sagging and their faces covered in shirts and bandanas, the men who sometimes answered "Mike Brown" when asked their names.

But these men are nothing new. If anything, it's likely more of them existed in the 1960s. In Harlem in July 1964, when riots were sparked by the shooting of unarmed teenager James Powell by police officer James Gilligan, not even famed King lieutenant Bayard Rustin could calm the furious crowd, which Branch writes jeered Rustin as an Uncle Tom. Rustin's response: "I am prepared to be a Tom if that's the only way I can save women and children from being shot down in the street!" When James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality told rioters they were merely inciting a police backlash, they told him, "We don't wanna hear that shit!"

Fifty years later, walking down West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson in the early hours of the morning, Charles Mayo would recall a similar experience after a night of mediating between police and protesters. "'Y'all helping the man,'" Mayo said he was told. "No, I'm helping another kid get home tonight."

Since Aug. 19, the nightly clashes between police and protesters have ebbed. That night, wave after wave of green-clad police crashed into the crowd seeking those suspected of throwing bottles or rocks at police, but there was no tear gas. Clergy and black-clad peacekeepers huddled with men erupting in tearful rage at the police, preventing physical confrontations. Even if no one was thinking about Watts, or Detroit, or Birmingham, those nights long past were present, as the protesters looked at themselves through the eyes of the world. The protesters cried, "This is what you want," and "Don't give them what they want," not just to the police but the media, whom they feared were escalating tensions in pursuit of a good story, compounding the tragedy of Brown's death by turning black suffering into nightly entertainment.

The protests began to subside even though protesters achieved few of the goals they were seeking. Wilson's case is in the hands of a grand jury, but he hasn't been indicted or arrested - and his supporters have raised more money than the Brown family. St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McColluch, whom Michael Brown supporters see as biased because of his backing for the Ferguson police's militarized response to the protests, a previous police shooting that he prosecuted, and because his father, a police officer, was killed by a black man while on duty, has not been recused from the case. As in the past, the nightly clashes with police may have sustained the protests by giving the community something to fight against.

But that doesn't mean this is over. On Saturday, the NAACP organized a march of more than a thousand people down West Florissant Avenue, chanting, "Ain't no power like the people's power 'cause the people have the power to vote." Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson and St. Louis County Police Chief John Belmar marched along quietly at the head of the line holding an NAACP banner. The demonstration was meant to "show we can march in a way that is dignified, organized, and respectful," said the NAACP's John Gaskin, an implicit rebuke to the violence that marred earlier protests. "The first way for a community to heal is to show things are going to back to normal and not escalating."

Brown's neighborhood of Canfield Green has since become a kind of town square for black Ferguson. Residents gather there every day to talk politics and receive aid from Better Family Life, a charity that offers food, supplies, and counseling to residents hemmed in by the constant protests. Cars gingerly roll by a shrine to Brown, made up of melted candles, stuffed animals bleached by the summer sun, and dried flowers assembled around two traffic cones.

Some Ferguson residents viewed the violence as a necessary evil. "If you ask me, it wouldn't be this big if it wasn't for the looting and the riot, that's what got it mainstream," said Reggie Martin, who lives in Canfield Green.

"That's why I love them young black boys, they might be white in they heads but the fact that they acting like white folks got a reaction from white folks," added Isanusi Alimayu, one of Martin's co-workers. Referring to the rancher who refused to pay cattle-grazing fees because he didn't recognize the federal government, Alimayu said, "You remember Cliven Bundy. They got all them white men up there with submachine guns aimed at the cops - did any of them white boys get a scratch? Hell naw, because they Americans."

Adam Serwer is the national editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, D.C. His secure PGP fingerprint is 883A 7AB8 4736 1BB9 A061 D26A F2B5 71C0 391A 0252

Contact Adam Serwer at adam.serwer@buzzfeed.com.

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The story of violent black protest in the U.S. is an old one - it's self-destructive but it sometimes gets results. Posted on August 25, 2014, at 5:32 p.m. ET The nightly protests in Ferguson, Mo., are receding.

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This story has been updated.
Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts - 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.

One way of appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica's analysis shows, is to calculate how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring - 185, more than one per week.

ProPublica's risk analysis on young males killed by police certainly seems to support what has been an article of faith in the African American community for decades: Blacks are being killed at disturbing rates when set against the rest of the American population.

Our examination involved detailed accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides stretching from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Report. The data, annually self-reported by hundreds of police departments across the country, confirms some assumptions, runs counter to others, and adds nuance to a wide range of questions about the use of deadly police force.

Colin Loftin, University at Albany professor and co-director of the Violence Research Group, said the FBI data is a minimum count of homicides by police, and that it is impossible to precisely measure what puts people at risk of homicide by police without more and better records. Still, what the data shows about the race of victims and officers, and the circumstances of killings, are "certainly relevant," Loftin said.

"No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system," he said. "This is one example."

The FBI's data has appeared in news accounts over the years, and surfaced again with the August killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. To a great degree, observers and experts lamented the limited nature of the FBI's reports. Their shortcomings are inarguable.

The data, for instance, is terribly incomplete. Vast numbers of the country's 17,000 police departments don't file fatal police shooting reports at all, and many have filed reports for some years but not others. Florida departments haven't filed reports since 1997 and New York City last reported in 2007. Information contained in the individual reports can also be flawed. Still, lots of the reporting police departments are in larger cities, and at least 1000 police departments filed a report or reports over the 33 years.

There is, then, value in what the data can show while accepting, and accounting for, its limitations. Indeed, while the absolute numbers are problematic, a comparison between white and black victims shows important trends. Our analysis included dividing the number of people of each race killed by police by the number of people of that race living in the country at the time, to produce two different rates: the risk of getting killed by police if you are white and if you are black.

David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor and expert on police use of deadly force, said racial disparities in the data could result from "measurement error," meaning that the unreported killings could alter ProPublica's findings.

However, he said the disparity between black and white teenage boys is so wide, "I doubt the measurement error would account for that."

ProPublica spent weeks digging into the many rich categories of information the reports hold: the race of the officers involved; the circumstances cited for the use of deadly force; the age of those killed.
Who Gets Killed?
The finding that young black men are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police is drawn from reports filed for the years 2010 to 2012, the three most recent years for which FBI numbers are available.

The black boys killed can be disturbingly young. There were 41 teens 14 years or younger reported killed by police from 1980 to 2012 ii. 27 of them were black iii; 8 were white iv; 4 were Hispanic v and 1 was Asian vi.

That's not to say officers weren't killing white people. Indeed, some 44 percent of all those killed by police across the 33 years were white.

White or black, though, those slain by police tended to be roughly the same age. The average age of blacks killed by police was 30. The average age of whites was 35.
Who is killing all those black men and boys?
Mostly white officers. But in hundreds of instances, black officers, too. Black officers account for a little more than 10 percent of all fatal police shootings. Of those they kill, though, 78 percent were black.

White officers, given their great numbers in so many of the country's police departments, are well represented in all categories of police killings. White officers killed 91 percent of the whites who died at the hands of police. And they were responsible for 68 percent of the people of color killed. Those people of color represented 46 percent of all those killed by white officers.
What were the circumstances surrounding all these fatal encounters?
There were 151 instances in which police noted that teens they had shot dead had been fleeing or resisting arrest at the time of the encounter. 67 percent of those killed in such circumstances were black. That disparity was even starker in the last couple of years: of the 15 teens shot fleeing arrest from 2010 to 2012, 14 were black.

Did police always list the circumstances of the killings? No, actually, there were many deadly shooting where the circumstances were listed as "undetermined." 77 percent of those killed in such instances were black.
Certainly, there were instances where police truly feared for their lives.
Of course, although the data show that police reported that as the cause of their actions in far greater numbers after the 1985 Supreme Court decision that said police could only justify using deadly force if the suspects posed a threat to the officer or others. From 1980 to 1984, "officer under attack" was listed as the cause for 33 percent of the deadly shootings. Twenty years later, looking at data from 2005 to 2009, "officer under attack" was cited in 62 percent xxxvii of police killings.
Does the data include cases where police killed people with something other than a standard service handgun?
Yes, and the Los Angeles Police Department stood out in its use of shotguns. Most police killings involve officers firing handguns xl. But from 1980 to 2012, 714 involved the use of a shotgun xli. The Los Angeles Police Department has a special claim on that category. It accounted for 47 cases xlii in which an officer used a shotgun. The next highest total came from the Dallas Police Department:
For more civil rights coverage, read Segregation Now, the resegregation of America's schools, and Living Apart, how the government beytrayed a landmark civil rights law. Update (Dec. 23, 2014): ProPublica shared its findings and methodology with Prof. David Klinger before this story appeared. In two interviews with reporters, he noted that the FBI data has serious shortcomings . But he also said the disparity ProPublica had found between black and white victims was so large, it was unlikely to have resulted solely from omissions in the FBI statistics. After the story appeared, Klinger said flaws in the FBI data made it unusable. ProPublica contacted Klinger and asked him to elaborate, but he declined to comment further. We stand by the analysis. A full response to the arguments Klinger and another critic have raised is here.
i ProPublica calculated a statistical figure called a risk ratio by dividing the rate of black homicide victims by the rate of white victims. This ratio, commonly used in epidemiology, gives an estimate for how much more at risk black teenagers were to be killed by police officers.Risk ratios can have varying levels of precision, depending on a variety of mathematical factors. In this case, because such shootings are rare from a statistical perspective, a 95 percent confidence interval indicates that black teenagers are at between 10 and 40 times greater risk of being killed by a police officer. The calculation used 2010-2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

ii https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307015-victims-14under-byraceanddecade-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179431

iii https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307015-victims-14under-byraceanddecade-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179432

iv https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307015-victims-14under-byraceanddecade-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179433

v https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307015-victims-14under-byraceanddecade-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179434

vi https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307015-victims-14under-byraceanddecade-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179435

xxxvii https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307298-circumstances-yearcats-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179463

xl Calculated from the "Weapon Used by Offender" variable. Ranked based on frequency of reported shotgun homicides by police agencies.

xli https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307312-offweapon-bystate-spssoutput.html#document/p3/a179466

xlii https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307313-offweapon-lapd-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179467

xliii https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/1307316-offweapon-dallas-spssoutput.html#document/p1/a179468

Ryan Gabrielson is a reporter for ProPublica covering the U.S. justice system.

Eric Sagara was the News Applications Fellow at ProPublica. Prior to that he was a reporter on the Newark Star-Ledger's data team.

Ryann Grochowski Jones is the deputy data editor at ProPublica.

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Deadly Force, in Black and White - ProPublica

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This story has been updated. Young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts - 21 times greater i, according to a ProPublica analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings.

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Housing discrimination was once as blatantly rampant as televised singing competitions, until the practice was officially banned by the federal government in 1968. Unfortunately, as with most things that are banned by the federal government, many people view that as less of a roadblock and more of a rough spot in the pavement that simply requires a bit of "creative" (aka "sidewalk") driving.

Jupiterimages/Stockbyte/Getty Images "I know you think this house is beautiful, but do you know what else is beautiful?

The bride who was murdered here on her wedding night."

We know this because about once every 10 years the Department of Housing and Urban Development tests the housing market for discrimination. The first test, in 1977, showed that real estate agents were essentially behaving like bouncers for the world's most unabashedly racist nightclub: they'd tell black buyers that there were no listings available, then turn right around and show all those "unavailable" properties to white buyers. Sure, it's different nowadays -- minorities have about the same chance of getting shown available units as white people. But that's only because real estate agents have figured out a bunch of sneakier ways to avoid actually leasing anything to non-white applicants.

They'll show minority prospects fewer of their available units or show them homes in less desirable neighborhoods. Real estate agents and landlords also tend to hassle minorities more about their finances: in one instance from the latest HUD test, an agent refused to meet with a black tester who hadn't prequalified for a loan. However, that same agent happily met with a white tester and didn't even ask whether or not she had prequalified. And speaking of loans, agents are more than happy to help white applicants secure financing, but any minority prospects are expected to figure that shit out on their own.

Jupiterimages/Stockbyte/Getty Images "I think I figured out the down payment. How attached are you to having
two kidneys?"

Finally, in what is arguably the most insane submarining tactic of modern real estate, agents will often tell minority candidates that a unit is more expensive than it actually is, to discourage them from leasing it (the unit's actual price is freely disclosed to white applicants, however). Additionally, white prospects are told that certain costs, such as deposits, are negotiable, whereas minority prospects are given static, immovable figures across the board. This means that if a person of color actually succeeds in finding a place to live, they'll often wind up paying more for it than a white tenant would.

None of this speakeasy bullshit is meant to suggest that the more overt discrimination in real estate has completely died out, however -- one undercover investigation by the Fair Housing Justice Center discovered that some superintendents in New York City are still sticking to the time-honored tradition of straight-up telling minority applicants that no units are available, while simultaneously showing any and all Princes of Whiteness their cornucopia of available properties. And unless you feel like returning in a few weeks to knock on every single door in the building to see if anyone answers, you have absolutely no way of knowing whether that landlord who brusquely told you there were no vacancies left in his building was lying or not.

Tom_Penpark/iStock/Getty Images "This apartment isn't vacant; they're ... minimalists.
Ghost minimalists."

And that's the thing -- you'd like to think that in the cold, cruel world of business, only the bottom line matters. Why say no to a paying customer, regardless of race? But think about everything you've read up to now: in a world where people are afraid of (or at least, unnerved by) black folks, you might figure it's bad business to rent to them if it means scaring away your other customers. It's kind of like how supposedly liberal Hollywood is careful not to cast too many black actors in a movie, for fear it will scare away white audiences. Even if you're not racist, you might wind up running your business on the assumption that other people are.

And thus the whole cycle just perpetuates itself.
For more ways bigotry still exists in plain sight, check out 8 Racist Ads You Won't Believe Are From the Last Few Years. And then check out 19 Changes to the Internet If All Prejudices Were Reversed. Are you on reddit? Check it: We are too! Click on over to our best of Cracked subreddit. Shocked by what you read? Click the Facebook share button and pass it along.

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5 Studies That Prove Racism Is Still Way Worse Than We Think

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Housing discrimination was once as blatantly rampant as televised singing competitions, until the practice was officially banned by the federal government in 1968. Unfortunately, as with most things that are banned by the federal government, many people view that as less of a roadblock and more of a rough spot in the pavement that simply requires a bit of "creative" (aka "sidewalk") driving.

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Most states allow unmarked cars for undercover and confidential investigation purposes, but the law varies on whether or not patrol cars used for traffic enforcement must be marked. Some prohibit it, some allow it, some specify which departments are allowed unmarked cars and which are not (state vs. local, for example).

Entrapment

The officer would have to entice or persuade you to commit the crime for it to be entrapment. Simply being in an unmarked vehicle observing you commit a crime is not considered enticing you or persuading you.

If the officer was in an unmarked car, revving his engine, and encouraging you to race him, and you did, that could perhaps be considered entrapment. But that never happens.

Legality of Marked Cars Vary

Here is an example of Texas law. Other states vary.

§ 721.004. INSCRIPTION REQUIRED ON MUNICIPAL AND COUNTY-OWNED MOTOR VEHICLES AND HEAVY EQUIPMENT.

(a) The office having control of a motor vehicle or piece of heavy equipment owned by a municipality or county shall have printed on each side of the vehicle or equipment the name of the municipality or county, followed by the title of the department or office having custody of the vehicle or equipment.

(b) The inscription must be in a color sufficiently different from the body of the vehicle or equipment so that the lettering is plainly legible.

(c) The title of the department or office must be in letters plainly legible at a distance of not less than 100 feet.

Acts 1995, 74th Leg., ch. 165, § 1, eff. Sept. 1, 1995.

Another state, Washington, allows state police to use unmarked cars for traffic patrol, but not local police.

RCW 46.08.065 Publicly owned vehicles to be marked - Exceptions. (excerpt)

(1) It is unlawful for any public officer having charge of any vehicle owned or controlled by any county, city, town, or public body in this state other than the state of Washington and used in public business to operate the same upon the public highways of this state unless and until there shall be displayed upon such automobile or other motor vehicle in letters of contrasting color not less than one and one-quarter inches in height in a conspicuous place on the right and left sides thereof, the name of such county, city, town, or other public body, together with the name of the department or office upon the business of which the said vehicle is used. This section shall not apply to vehicles of a sheriff's office, local police department, or any vehicles used by local peace officers under public authority for special undercover or confidential investigative purposes.

Traffic control vehicles of the Washington state patrol may be exempted from the requirements of subsection (2) of this section at the discretion of the chief of the Washington state patrol.

Getting Around the Restrictions

In places where there are restrictions, the police usually get around the requirement by being creative in what constitutes "marked."

For example, for years, Houston has used white cars with white lettering on the sides to make the cars less obvious. The white is reflective and is visible when looking directly at it, making it "sufficiently different" as required under the law.

I heard of another city putting the police department's logo on the roof of the car, with no other indications that it was a police car. The way the law was written in that state meant that, technically, it was marked.

So, basically, it depends on the state.

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Has there been a change in US law or code that has allowed for the dramatic increase in unmarked police cars in recent years?

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Answer (1 of 3): As far as I know, there are normally no laws that prevent or prohibit the use of unmarked vehicles. The choice of whether or not a vehicle is marked or unmarked is a matter of tactical advantage or officer safety.

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Due 3/5/15

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Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly "corrupt" always imply that the United States is not corrupt.

VOA reports :

While it is true that you don't typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America's political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.

1. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. House Majority leader John Boehner has actually just handed out cash on the floor of the House from the tobacco industry to other representatives.

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L'Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven't been anywhere near his house.

American politicians don't represent "the people." With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.

2. That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called "regulatory capture") means that they will be so bribed. Billions were spent and 3,000 lobbyists employed by bankers to remove cumbersome rules in the zeroes. Thus, political corruption enabled financial corruption (in some cases legalizing it!) Without regulations and government auditing, the finance sector went wild and engaged in corrupt practices that caused the 2008 crash. Too bad the poor Afghans can't just legislate their corruption out of existence by regularizing it, the way Wall street did.

3. That the chief villains of the 2008 meltdown (from which 90% of Americans have not recovered) have not been prosecuted is itself a form of corruption.

4. The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn't usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I've seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside.

5. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system. It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.

6. The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. This and other government policies has produced a situation where 400 American billionaires are worth $2 trillion, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn't been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.

7. The National Security Agency's domestic spying is a form of corruption in itself, and lends itself to corruption. With some 4 million government employees and private contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is highly unlikely that various forms of insider trading and other corrupt practices are not being committed. If you knew who Warren Buffett and George Soros were calling every day, that alone could make you a killing. The American political class wouldn't be defending this indefensible invasion of citizens' privacy so vigorously if someone somewhere weren't making money on it.

8. As for insider trading, it turns out Congress undid much of the law it hastily passed forbidding members, rather belatedly, to engage in insider trading (buying and selling stock based on their privileged knowledge of future government policy). That this practice only became an issue recently is another sign of how corrupt the system is.

9. Asset forfeiture in the 'drug war' is corrupting police departments and the judiciary.

10. Money and corruption have seeped so far into our media system that people can with a straight face assert that scientists aren't sure human carbon emissions are causing global warming. Fox Cable News is among the more corrupt institutions in American society, purveying outright lies for the benefit of the billionaire class. The US is so corrupt that it is resisting the obvious urgency to slash carbon production. Even our relatively progressive president talks about exploiting all sources of energy, as though hydrocarbons were just as valuable as green energy and as though hydrocarbons weren't poisoning the earth.

Even Qatar, its economy based on natural gas, freely admits the challenge of human-induced climate change. American politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their know-nothingism on climate.

So don't tell the Philippines or the other victims of American corruption how corrupt they are for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren't corrupt, you're respectable.

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Top 10 Ways the US is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

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Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly "corrupt" always imply that the United States is …

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Hidden Colors 2- Prison Warfare (sneak preview)

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Get Hidden Colors 1,2 and 3 now at http://hiddencolorsfilm.com

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MORE UPDATES

A rundown of major incidents of police corruption and brutality over the past 30 years...

Civil rights lawyer Mary Howell represents Algiers clients filing civil lawsuits against the police. Years later, she tells FRONTLINE she discovered that basic police procedures -- report writing and trip sheets -- had been abandoned during the days after Neupert's death. "We had trouble identifying [where] all officers were," she explains, "... but it also meant officers couldn't account for what they were doing."

In 1983, following a federal probe, seven officers -- the "Algiers 7" -- are indicted and three are convicted of violating the civil rights of four civilians during interrogations. Charges are never filed relating to the four civilian deaths.

In April 1986, the City of New Orleans pays roughly $2.8 million to settle lawsuits filed by citizens alleging mistreatment.

Officer killed; police vow revenge

Adolph Archie, a petty criminal, escapes from a work release program, and trying to steal a car, he assaults a security guard, takes her gun and runs. Officer Earl Hauck chases him, and in a standoff, Archie shoots Hauck four times, killing him. Pursued by other officers, Archie is shot in the arm and apprehended. While he's being driven to the hospital, mobs of officers line the streets threatening to kill Archie and radio scanners record officers encouraging violence.

Instead of going to the hospital, the police bring Archie to the First District police station -- Hauck's home station. It's unclear what happens there; some officers describe a scuffle. Archie eventually is transported to the hospital, where x-rays are taken (and subsequently lost), and he is injected with iodine to which he's allergic. Archie dies 13 hours later.

Initially, coroner Frank Minyard rules his death to be consistent with a bad fall. Another autopsy, initiated by Mary Howell, representing Archie's family, indicates Archie was beaten to death. Minyard then changes the cause of death to "homicide by police intervention."

The Orleans Parish investigates the incident for six months before clearing the officers involved. The NOPD pays Archie's family $333,000 in damages -- one-third of which is designated for Officer Hauck's family -- following a wrongful death lawsuit.

Civil rights attorney Howell describes Archie's death as "the beginning of the end for this police department, the fact that this could happen in broad daylight, openly." Warren Riley, former NOPD chief, who was then a young officer, remembers the incident differently: "What I can say is that Adolph Archie did in fact steal [an] officer's weapon, and he did kill a police officer. ... There's some skepticism on whether Adolph Archie died in the hospital as it relates to something medically, something a doctor did, or something a police officer did. There's two sides to that story."

The peak of NOPD's brutality and corruption

NOPD's problems draw national attention. The New York Times Magazine publishes an article in March 1996 describing the NOPD as "The Thinnest Blue Line." It notes New Orleans was the nation's homicide capital in 1992 and 1994; that the NOPD solved just 37 percent of murders -- roughly half the national average; and that federal officials estimate 10 to 15 percent of the force is corrupt.

The Times points to one root of the corruption: The culture of moonlighting and private security details -- often at bars or strip clubs -- due to the NOPD's low salaries. In 1993, new officers made less than $20,000 per year.

According to historian Leonard Moore, the culture becomes one of "pseudo-organized crime. ... The allegiance becomes to this seedy, after-hours establishment that you are guarding ... as opposed to your particular shift at the precinct."

In 1993, the NOPD's vice squad is essentially disbanded after allegations of theft and shakedowns in New Orleans nightclubs and massage parlors -- nine of its 12 members are assigned to desk jobs with other police units. That year, two officers are charged with raping a woman they arrested. As the year ends, 17 officers have been arrested or convicted of various crimes.

Paradoxically, Davis had a reputation for being both roguish and a good cop: Between 1987 and 1992, he received 20 complaints and was suspended six times. He was also awarded the NOPD's second highest honor, the Medal of Merit, in 1993. "He was Robocop to some people," historian Leonard Moore tells FRONTLINE. "But then he was, I would say, Officer Friendly to other people."

Tried and sentenced to death for Groves' murder, Davis remains on death row. He is one of nine officers later indicted on federal weapons and drug charges for their participation in the cocaine ring; a half dozen, including Davis, are convicted.

Teenager Chau Vu survives by hiding in a cooler during the robbery. When the call goes out that there's a shooting, Frank returns to the restaurant supposedly to help in the investigation. Chau Vu identifies her as the shooter, and Frank is arrested, tried and convicted of first-degree murder. Sentenced to death in September 1995, she remains on death row. LaCaze is also convicted of murder and sentenced to death row.

Disturbing details later emerge about Frank: She had failed two psychological exams before being admitted to the police academy; a supervisor recommended she return to the academy for more training, and she had stolen the gun used in the murders from the NOPD evidence room.

Nagin names NOPD veteran Eddie Compass chief of police. NOPD critics condemn this appointment, asserting that tapping an insider will virtually erase the progress made during Pennington's eight years of leadership.

NOPD officers suspected in beating death

A month before Katrina hits, Raymond Robair, a Treme resident with a record of drug dealing and possession, is brought to a hospital by New Orleans police. He's suffering from severe injuries, including several broken ribs and a ruptured spleen. The officers tell hospital staff they saw him "stumbling and holding his upper chest area" before collapsing on the street. Robair dies at the hospital. Coroner Frank Minyard rules the death "accidental" based primarily on the police report, which is filed as a response to a "medical incident."

Treme residents who witness the event, however, give a very different account: They say Robair was beaten by police. According to a July 2010 Times-Picayune article: "Numerous people say they were outside that morning and saw police punch, kick and stomp on Robair. They say police chased him, beat him and then ushered him away in the back of a police car." After Katrina strikes New Orleans, Robair's case is momentarily forgotten.

Two years after the hurricane, Mary Howell, the Robair family's attorney, has an independent autopsy performed by Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner, who rules Robair's death a homicide. The case is brought before the district attorney in 2007 and subsequently dismissed.

The FBI continues investigating the incident, however, and in July 2010, Officers Melvin Williams and Matthew Dean Moore are indicted on federal charges related to Robair's death. Williams pleads innocent to charges of beating Robair and obstructing justice under the federal deprivation of civil rights statute; Moore pleads innocent to obstruction and lying to the FBI.

When told about Officer Thomas' shooting, Mayor Nagin is "furious," according press secretary Sally Forman: "He turned and said: 'We need to declare martial law. This is not what we're dealing with right now. We are dealing with search and rescue. We're dealing with saving lives. If some thug or some thugs are going to go after our cops, then we're going after them.'"

Traumatized by the storm, two NOPD officers, Lawrence Celestine and Paul Accardo commit suicide within days of one another in early September. On Sept. 5, The Boston Globe quotes Chief Compass as saying that "'the world can't understand' what has happened in New Orleans in recent days."

Motionless bodies photographed on Religious Street

Times-Picayune reporter Gordon Russell and freelance photographer Marko Georgiev encounter and photograph officers standing near two motionless bodies on the ground. Officers pull guns on Russell and Georgiev, frisk them and take Russell's notebook and one of Georgiev's cameras. Neither Russell nor Georgiev can determine if the two men are dead or alive, and no police reports are ever filed about the incident. But the officers fail to take the memory card from Georgiev's camera, and in December 2009, FRONTLINE, ProPublica and The Times-Picayune publish the photos, hoping to determine what happened to the two men.

In August 2010, Russell tracks down the men in the photographs, Robert Williams and Ernest "Ricky" Bell -- both are alive and allege that police beat them after mistaking them for participants in a shootout. On Aug. 14, 2010, the Justice Department opens a civil rights investigation into the case.

McCann is arrested but released on his own recognizance. He is never charged with a crime and later files a civil lawsuit against the NOPD. McCann is murdered in August 2008 with the lawsuit pending. No one has been charged in his death. Federal investigators are now looking into the circumstances surrounding his 2005 shooting.

"These troops know how to shoot and kill..."

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco brings in 300 Arkansas National Guard troops to help restore order. She states: "They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. ... These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

"What we were doing was strengthening the appearance of a lawful environment," Blanco explains to FRONTLINE. "Everybody here had now gotten very fearful, whether it was justified or not. I just decided that we needed to make a very dramatic statement to calm the media down and to calm the citizenry down."

A burned car containing Glover's badly charred body is discovered on a levee by two private security consultants about a week after Hurricane Katrina. One of the men, Istvan Balogh, reports his findings to federal authorities, the NOPD, the state police and the military. Another week goes by before Glover's remains are taken to the coroner's office. In his final report, Coroner Frank Minyard leaves the cause of death blank, and the case is set aside. Eight months later, Glover's remains are identified through DNA evidence and returned to the family.

On Dec. 18, 2008, ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson's article on the Glover case is published in The Nation. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten tells FRONTLINE the story was "an incredible catalyst and a lead for us in our investigation." The FBI begins investigating Glover's death as a possible civil rights violation.

On June 11, 2010, former Officer David Warren is charged with shooting and killing Glover; four other officers are indicted for their roles in the incident: Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer Greg McRae are charged with assaulting Tanner and King, burning the car containing Glover's body and obstructing a federal investigation; former Lt. Robert Italiano and Lt. Travis McCabe are charged with obstructing justice and lying to the FBI. McCabe is also charged with perjury.

Matthew McDonald's family in Connecticut receives several conflicting accounts of his death. It's not until they're contacted by a reporter in late 2009 that they learn he had been shot by a police officer. As of August 2010, a federal grand jury is investigating the case.

Brumfield's family files a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of New Orleans, and they are awarded $400,000 in July 2008. In August 2010, Mitchell and Jones receive letters indicating they are targets in a federal investigation into Brumfield's death.

In December 2006, the New Orleans District Attorney's office indicts seven officers in the shootings. Judge Raymond Bigelow dismisses the charges in October 2008 due to prosecutorial missteps. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten announces the start of a federal investigation a month later. After an exhaustive inquiry, the feds allege that the civilians on the bridge were unarmed and that police concocted a massive conspiracy to cover up their actions.

Eleven officers are indicted for their roles in the incident: Sgt. Kenneth Bowen, Sgt. Robert Gisevius, former Officer Robert Faulcon and Officer Anthony Villavaso are each charged with a civil rights violation in the shooting death of Brisette, as well as for injuring several members of the Bartholomew family.

Faulcon and Bowen are also charged with civil rights violations in the death of Madison; Faulcon is charged with killing the mentally disabled man, who was shot in the back; and Bowen is charged with kicking and stomping on Madison's body after he had been shot.

Homicide detectives Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and former Sgt. Gerard Dugue are charged, along with Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso, with participating in the coverup, conspiracy to obstruct justice and making false statements to investigators.

Five additional current and former officers have pled guilty to various charges: Ignatius Hills to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of misprision of a felony, or failing to report a crime; Michael Hunter to one count of conspiring to obstruct justice and one count of misprision of a felony; Robert Barrios to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice; Michael Lohman to obstructing justice; and Jeffrey Lehrmann to misprison of a felony.

U.S. Justice Department brought into New Orleans; indictments in post-Katrina shootings

On May 5, Mayor Landrieu sends a letter [PDF] to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder asking for his "support and partnership in transforming the New Orleans Police Department," stating that he "inherited a police force that has been described by many as one of the worst police departments in the country."

In August, members of the Justice Department are dispatched to New Orleans to investigate the city's police department, root out corruption and advise leaders on improving the department's relationship with citizens.

As of Aug. 25, more than a dozen current and former officers have been indicted, and there are at least nine ongoing federal investigations of the NOPD, most of which involve actions taken by the police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Sources: Press accounts; Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina by Leonard Moore (Louisiana State University Press, 2010); " Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States" (Human Rights Watch, 1998); History of New Orleans Police Department (City of New Orleans).

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Law & Disorder - Timeline: NOPD's Long History of Scandal

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MORE UPDATES A rundown of major incidents of police corruption and brutality over the past 30 years... Civil rights lawyer Mary Howell represents Algiers clients filing civil lawsuits against the police. Years later, she tells FRONTLINE she discovered that basic police procedures -- report writing and trip sheets -- had been abandoned during the days after Neupert's death.

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A History of Racial Injustice - Equal Justice Initiative

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Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military exclusion of any citizens from areas deemed critical to national defense and potentially vulnerable to espionage.

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The Voting Rights Act of 1965

The 1965 Enactment

By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.

Congress determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment. The legislative hearings showed that the Department of Justice's efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices by litigation on a case-by-case basis had been unsuccessful in opening up the registration process; as soon as one discriminatory practice or procedure was proven to be unconstitutional and enjoined, a new one would be substituted in its place and litigation would have to commence anew.

President Johnson signed the resulting legislation into law on August 6, 1965. Section 2 of the Act, which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the literacy tests on a nationwide basis. Among its other provisions, the Act contained special enforcement provisions targeted at those areas of the country where Congress believed the potential for discrimination to be the greatest. Under Section 5, jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect. In addition, the Attorney General could designate a county covered by these special provisions for the appointment of a federal examiner to review the qualifications of persons who wanted to register to vote. Further, in those counties where a federal examiner was serving, the Attorney General could request that federal observers monitor activities within the county's polling place.

The Voting Rights Act had not included a provision prohibiting poll taxes, but had directed the Attorney General to challenge its use. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), the Supreme Court held Virginia's poll tax to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Between 1965 and 1969 the Supreme Court also issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices that required Section 5 review. As the Supreme Court put it in its 1966 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Act:

Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.

South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966).

The 1970 and 1975 Amendments

Congress extended Section 5 for five years in 1970 and for seven years in 1975. With these extensions Congress validated the Supreme Court's broad interpretation of the scope of Section 5. During the hearings on these extensions Congress heard extensive testimony concerning the ways in which voting electorates were manipulated through gerrymandering, annexations, adoption of at-large elections, and other structural changes to prevent newly-registered black voters from effectively using the ballot. Congress also heard extensive testimony about voting discrimination that had been suffered by Hispanic, Asian and Native American citizens, and the 1975 amendments added protections from voting discrimination for language minority citizens.

In 1973, the Supreme Court held certain legislative multi-member districts unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment on the ground that they systematically diluted the voting strength of minority citizens in Bexar County, Texas. This decision in White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755 (1973), strongly shaped litigation through the 1970s against at-large systems and gerrymandered redistricting plans. In Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980), however, the Supreme Court required that any constitutional claim of minority vote dilution must include proof of a racially discriminatory purpose, a requirement that was widely seen as making such claims far more difficult to prove.

The 1982 Amendments

Congress renewed in 1982 the special provisions of the Act, triggered by coverage under Section 4 for twenty-five years. Congress also adopted a new standard, which went into effect in 1985, providing how jurisdictions could terminate (or "bail out" from) coverage under the provisions of Section 4. Furthermore, after extensive hearings, Congress amended Section 2 to provide that a plaintiff could establish a violation of the Section without having to prove discriminatory purpose.

The 2006 Amendments

Congress renewed the special provisions of the Act in 2006 as part of the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Cesar E. Chavez, Barbara Jordan, William Velazquez and Dr. Hector Garcia Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act. The 2006 legislation eliminated the provision for voting examiners.

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By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism.

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The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its black population than apartheid South Africa did. Black men have a one-in-three chance of being incarcerated at one point in their lives, and receive sentences 20 percent longer than whites on-average when they are.

That this state of affairs is manifestly unfair should be obvious. But the unfairnesses may be deeper and more devastating than you think: the criminal justice system may well be undermining black Americans' access to political power and life altogether.

At least, that's what Vesla Weaver believes. A professor of political science at Yale, Weaver and her colleague, philosopher Jason Stanley, argued that the disproportionate targeting of black Americans by police is undermining their faith in the democratic system, turning our nation into a " racial democracy" where only some groups of people feel free to engage in political life. For instance, Weaver's research finds that Americans who were incarcerated even for a short spell are a whopping 22 percent less likely to vote, even after accounting for the millions of people barred from voting after a felony conviction. The high rate of black incarceration, then, directly undermines the ability of black communities to elect leaders willing to fight for racial equality.

I got in touch with Weaver to talk about this troubling argument and to get a preview of her forthcoming book, coauthored with Princeton's Amy E. Lerman, laying out the evidence for it at length. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
When we're talking about democracy and the criminal justice system, everyone who's fairly familiar with the issue knows about the effect of felon disenfranchisement on democracy. What's less well known - what your piece highlighted - is that broader contact with the criminal justice system can also make people significantly less likely to participate in the political system. Can you talk a little bit about how you showed that?
It has long struck me that the focus on felon disenfranchisement was missing something - that formal exclusion was important, but it may not explain the entirety of why people choose to withdraw and choose to disengage. We know that some government programs empower people. They tell them that they have a voice in the operations of government; they tell them that they are valued political equals. One could think of Social Security recipients, who are some of the most actively engaged participants in the American political process. Suzanne Mettler has talked about G.I. Bill recipients becoming very active in the political process. So we wanted to compare this to the kind of contact most low-income minority citizens were having with government.

Our starting point really was just a simple observation: if you look at communities that are low-income and communities that are disadvantaged, their primary face of government - the government they see - it's not necessarily City Hall, it's not necessarily the DMV, it's not necessarily filing their taxes; it's the criminal justice system. We realized very quickly that no other political science surveys out there were asking about criminal justice contacts. They would ask, "have you ever received welfare, have you ever voted" - things like that - but they weren't considering criminal justice a primary way that citizens interact with their state.
How big is this effect? That is to say, can you roughly estimate how many people, and what kinds of people - I think that's very important in this context - are being pushed away from the political system by contact with the criminal justice system?
What we did is we used several other surveys within sociology - large, nationally representative (in some cases) surveys. We asked questions like, "have you ever been arrested, have you ever been stopped by police, have you ever been convicted of a crime, have you ever served hard time?" and looked at whether having a contact of that type affected a range of political behaviors and a range of attitudes about government. So trusting government, whether they feel that they can influence the political system. We looked at whether people felt like full and equal citizens; we looked at whether people felt that everyone in the U.S. had equal chances to succeed and several other questions.

What we found was that, lo and behold, it turns out that criminal justice is one of the biggest predictors of those kinds of politically salient attitudes. So even when you're comparing someone who's low-income, disadvantaged, maybe minority, who doesn't have contact with criminal justice to someone who does, there's a huge effect of having contact with criminal justice. We can also look over time at changes in perceptions, so one of our surveys allows us to see that once a person has had a contact of this sort with government, it drives down their feelings of trust in the government, it drives down their participation in democratic elections, it drives down how equal they feel.

The effect is very large, and it rises with each level of contact. So [for] somebody that has served a year or more in prison, the effects range from something like 22 to 26 percent decrease in voter turnout. That is equivalent to being a parent who doesn't have a college degree. That is equivalent to all of the sudden being under the federal poverty line. It's an enormous effect.

Normally, political scientists have focused on the key predictors of participation [being] things like, "do you have time, do you have money, do you have education?" We've found that these effects are just as large, if not larger, than those traditional predictors of participation, which has huge implications because folks are very interested in getting turnout to increase. They do these get-out-the-vote drives. Well this suggests that it's not just about lessening income gaps, it's not simply about giving people the information they need to vote, it's not simply about canvassing their neighborhoods. It's also about the types of messages government is sending them about their worth in the polity. You asked about, "does it affect certain types of people more than others?" Anybody that has contact with criminal justice has this effect. So even when you separate out blacks in the sample, it's not like the effects are larger.
So could this be creating a kind of political feedback loop, wherein there's already a system that is, in effect, structurally racist, and the structurally racist criminal justice system drives down African American political participation, which in turn prevents the sort of people who would want to take action in response to the demands of their constituents from taking office, allowing the whole system to continue?
But black and Latino populations have much higher rates of contact with the criminal justice system than whites. I see what you mean. The effect is definitely larger in that sense. If you look at race of contact across different populations, blacks are just orders of magnitude above whites. This is a very rare type of contact with government for whites. But if you look at blacks - particularly blacks without a high school education, particularly blacks who are of low income - we found that in one of the surveys, blacks had more contact with the criminal justice system than with what we would call the social provisions side of the state. More blacks were getting contact by criminal justice than, say, were getting the Earned Income Tax Credit or receiving welfare.

We used to get a lot of questions about "why are you considering [criminal justice] government?" But really, this is government for some communities. There are much larger proportions of blacks having this type of contact than, say, going to college, entering the military, [or experiencing] other types of more pro-social contact with government.

I definitely think that there's an important feedback. Somebody said to me the other day, "well blacks, when you look at it, based on census statistics, blacks have really high rates of turnout compared to whites." And that is true, but it's only true because those statistics eliminate blacks who are not in prison or jail. So when you actually add those folks back in, turnout rates decline substantially for blacks. When you add them back in, when you take account of all the people in prison and jail, only 20 percent of high school dropout black men actually voted in that election. That is just a level of political marginalization that no other group in America today has, with the exception of maybe undocumented immigrants.

And so the feedback loop [you identified] I think is important, but I want to suggest another feedback loop. So one of the people that I had a great exchange with about this article was a philosopher named Tommie Shelby, and he said to me, "but Vesla, most blacks have a sense that the criminal justice system is targeting them unfairly. Wouldn't that lead to mobilization, a sense of urgency to combat this system that's throwing them out of political life?" And I thought about his question for a long time. I responded and said "No." [When] we went and talked to people who had actually undergone this experience - had contact with criminal justice - again and again and again, we had people tell us, "No, we're not going to go vote, or I'm not going to contact the government because I'd better stay below the radar. If people see that I'm trying to make some claim or trying to ruffle things up, I'm going to get in more trouble than I already have been. I'd better stay below the radar."
Do you think that this also has broader implications about not just racial inequality, but economic inequality independent of the obvious connection between racial inequality and economic inequality in the United States?
What's important about that is that [the criminal justice system] is teaching people that if they engage, they will see harm visited upon them; they will see retribution. They have become fearful of the state that is supposed to be representing their interests. So the feedback that I want to point out - and that gets to the heart of this exchange I had with Tommie Shelby - is that, yes, [black Americans] feel a sense of collective injustice, but because the criminal justice system teaches them to stay low, they have decided to disengage, even when engaging would further their interests and could potentially get attention on this criminal justice issue.

And I think that's one of the most troubling aspects of this. It's teaching people to stay low, which further diminishes the political clout their community has. And I don't know what can be done to get around that. I think a whole generation is growing up fearing state contact because the state contact they have learned their communities have is with punitive government. It's not with representative government.

This goes beyond my research, but others have found that it has a very direct effect on racial inequality. There's been a lot of research across different fields that shows that people who have contact with criminal justice - particularly those who have been incarcerated [experience] a host of very, very bad economic and social effects. It leads to less earnings ability later in life, it leads to marital breakups, it leads to children growing up with aggressive behaviors, it leads to more foster care placements. My colleague here at Yale, Chris Wildeman, is doing work on that.

A mother's incarceration is much more likely to lead to a foster care placement and is one of the biggest contributors to why there is such vast disparity in foster care placements. Something like one in five black kids has at least one time in social services by the time they're 18. That is an astronomical number. That's like orphans in Russia.

Others have found that racial disparities in HIV/AIDS are explained in part - - I think a quarter of the racial disparity in HIV/AIDS contraction has to do with incarceration because AIDS rates among incarcerated people are very high. There's been work on psychological disorders and the role incarceration plays [in that]. People who are incarcerated are more likely to have children who become homeless. There are just a huge number of bad effects that, when you multiply these effects across communities, you begin to see what Bruce Western says is absolutely right, which is that incarceration is not just a reflector of poverty and disadvantage, it is actually a driver of poverty and disadvantage. People who have been incarcerated are much more likely to be impoverished after they've had this encounter than people who are similarly situated. So the short answer is yes, I think that this has everything to do with racial inequality, and not just as a reflector or mirror of racial inequality but as actually a producer of racial inequality in America today.

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How The Criminal Justice System Is Racializing Our Democracy

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The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its black population than apartheid South Africa did. Black men have a one-in-three chance of being incarcerated at one point in their lives, and receive sentences 20 percent longer than whites on-average when they are. That this state of affairs is manifestly unfair should be obvious.

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2/23/15

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This month the United States celebrates the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 to commemorate our shared history of the civil rights movement and our nation's continued progress towards racial equality. Yet decades later a broken criminal-justice system has proven that we still have a long way to go in achieving racial equality.

Today people of color continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. Further, racial disparities in the criminal-justice system threaten communities of color-disenfranchising thousands by limiting voting rights and denying equal access to employment, housing, public benefits, and education to millions more. In light of these disparities, it is imperative that criminal-justice reform evolves as the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Below we outline the top 10 facts pertaining to the criminal-justice system's impact on communities of color.

4. According to recent data by the Department of Education, African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates. The data showed that 96,000 students were arrested and 242,000 referred to law enforcement by schools during the 2009-10 school year. Of those students, black and Hispanic students made up more than 70 percent of arrested or referred students. Harsh school punishments, from suspensions to arrests, have led to high numbers of youth of color coming into contact with the juvenile-justice system and at an earlier age.

5. African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison. According to the Sentencing Project, even though African American juvenile youth are about 16 percent of the youth population, 37 percent of their cases are moved to criminal court and 58 percent of African American youth are sent to adult prisons.

8. Once convicted, black offenders receive longer sentences compared to white offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission stated that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes. The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more like to be sentenced to prison.

9. Voter laws that prohibit people with felony convictions to vote disproportionately impact men of color. An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote based on a past felony conviction. Felony disenfranchisement is exaggerated by racial disparities in the criminal-justice system, ultimately denying 13 percent of African American men the right to vote. Felony-disenfranchisement policies have led to 11 states denying the right to vote to more than 10 percent of their African American population.

Theses racial disparities have deprived people of color of their most basic civil rights, making criminal-justice reform the civil rights issue of our time. Through mass imprisonment and the overrepresentation of individuals of color within the criminal justice and prison system, people of color have experienced an adverse impact on themselves and on their communities from barriers to reintegrating into society to engaging in the democratic process. Eliminating the racial disparities inherent to our nation's criminal-justice policies and practices must be at the heart of a renewed, refocused, and reenergized movement for racial justice in America.

There have been a number of initiatives on the state and federal level to address the racial disparities in youth incarceration. Last summer Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Schools Discipline Initiative to bring increased awareness of effective policies and practices to ultimately dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. States like California and Massachusetts are considering legislation to address the disproportionate suspensions among students of color. And in Clayton County, Georgia, collaborative local reforms have resulted in a 47 percent reduction in juvenile-court referrals and a 51 percent decrease in juvenile felony rates. These initiatives could serve as models of success for lessening the disparities in incarceration rates.

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1 in 3 Black Men Go To Prison? The 10 Most Disturbing Facts About Racial Inequality in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

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In light of these disparities, it is imperative that criminal-justice reform evolves as the civil rights issue of the 21st century. This month the United States celebrates the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 to commemorate our shared history of the civil rights movement and our nation's continued progress towards racial equality.

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Last summer, the killings of two unarmed African American men-Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri-by white police officers reignited the national conversation about racial inequality in the United States. In both cases, grand juries declined to indict the officers involved. The rulings provoked a wave of protest marches, rallies, and road blockades across the country, as demonstrators of all skin colors proclaimed to the nation and to the world that "black lives matter."

The upheaval has stood in stark contrast to the promise of a transformation in race relations that President Barack Obama's inauguration appeared to hold six years ago. For many of Obama's supporters, his election represented a milestone in U.S. history, marking the dawn of a "postracial" society-a new era in which skin color would no longer stand as a barrier to opportunity or achievement. Obama himself embraced this imagery, insisting that "there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America." Although he acknowledged the country's history of racial division and conflict, he clearly envisioned a future in which racial distinctions would fade into insignificance, and he promoted himself as an avatar of that future.

Such lofty rhetoric already seems dated. But even as recent protests over race affirmed racial inequality as a defining feature of American life, it also offered a reminder of just how much the racial landscape in the United States has changed since the mid-twentieth century. Analyzing U.S. race relations in 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal identified what he called "an American dilemma": the wide gap between the American ideals of liberty and equality and the actual conditions of African American life. In Myrdal's view, racism was the root cause of the problem. Myrdal found that white Americans' support for segregation sprang from a widespread belief in black inferiority and that blacks' disadvantaged status tended to

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What accounts for the continuity of racial inequality in a postracist America? The fact that an earlier era's racism was built into the structure of various economic, social, and political institutions, so that even their race-neutral operations today produce imbalanced outcomes.

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Last night will be remembered as the social justice Oscars, with big winners like Patricia Arquette and Alejandro González Iñárritu using their podium time to address gender and racial inequality. But John Legend may have given the quote of the night. During his acceptance speech for Best Original Song, the singer dropped this bit of knowledge on the audience:

We know that the Voting Rights Act that they fought for 50 years ago is being compromised right now in this country today. We know that right now, the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world. There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850.

At Wonkblog, my colleague Max Ehrenfreund carefully parsed this claim. It's factual - but there are two things to keep in mind. First, people under correctional control include those on parole or probation, not just those behind bars. Furthermore, there are more than 10 times as many black people living in the United States today than in 1850. So though there may be more black people in the criminal justice system today, a far higher proportion were in slavery 165 years ago.

The American prison system is largely the domain of the states. At any given time, far more people are in state prison or local jails than in federal prison. According to the 2010 Census, only about 11 percent of people behind bars were in federal lockup. (This includes people in detention awaiting trial.)

At the federal level, only about 7 percent of convicted prisoners were guilty of a violent crime, while over half are there on drug charges. At the state level, the proportions are reversed. Just over half of people are locked up for violent crimes, while 19 percent are there for property crimes - theft, fraud, etc. - and 16 percent for drug crimes. (These numbers are from a Bureau of Justice Statistics report, which goes on to break down the populations by race.)

To put it in perspective, that is still about 46 percent of state prisoners who are behind bars for non-violent crimes. With many states struggling with overcrowding in their prisons, governors across the country are looking for ways to lower their incarceration rates, starting with the large populations of non-violent offenders.

Prison reform would make the biggest difference for black Americans. As John Legend alluded to last night, America's incarceration system is shot through with racial disparities. Some of the worst states are in the Midwest: In places like Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, black people are 10 times more likely to be in state prison or local jail.

In this chart, I used data from the Census Bureau to calculate incarceration rates for black and white Americans by state. (I excluded people in federal prison, since states have less control over that population.)

First off, it's pretty obvious that in every state, black people are more likely to be behind bars. If incarceration rates were equal, states would fall along the diagonal line at the very bottom of this chart. But in most states, the black incarceration rate is more than four times the white incarceration rate. In nearly half of states, it's six times the white incarceration rate.

Just look at the scale: For non-Hispanic white people, the incarceration rate ranges from 172 per 100,000 (Minnesota) to 672 (Oklahoma). For black people, the incarceration rate ranges from 845 (Hawaii) to a whopping 3,787 (Wisconsin).

The ranges for black and white people don't even overlap. That is to say, in Hawaii, where the black incarceration rate is the lowest in the country, black people are still more likely to be locked up than white people anywhere in the United States.

Here's another way of breaking apart the data. In places like Iowa and Minnesota, black people are more than 10 times as likely as white people to be in state prison or jail.

There's a loose relationship between how many African Americans live in a particular state, and how large the racial disparities are in its prison population. States that have the worst gaps between the white and black incarceration rate also tend to be overwhelmingly white. These are places like Iowa, Minnesota, Vermont and Montana.

States with high black populations, particularly those in the South, have smaller disparities. In Mississippi, black people are "only" about three times as likely as white people to be in state or local lockup. Relatively speaking, the state has an unusually equitable ratio compared to the rest of America. But in absolute terms, these facts raise painful questions about the way our justice system treats people of color.

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John Legend is right: Prisons are disproportionately black. The worst states are some of the whitest.

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Last night will be remembered as the social justice Oscars, with big winners like Patricia Arquette and Alejandro González Iñárritu using their podium time to address gender and racial inequality. But John Legend may have given the quote of the night.

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justice dept. could sue ferguson for discrimination - cnnpolitics

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Justice Dept. could sue Ferguson for discrimination - CNNPolitics

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The Justice Department could sue the Ferguson, Missouri, police department over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics