Inconclusive

I did a few days of on-and-off data research trying to get to the bottom of what causes the racial profiling phenomenon in the US. I was hoping to find out commonalities in the areas that had the highest disparities of black vs white traffic stops, arrest rates, and court convictions. I have a hard time believing that cops all over the country, who often have very few similarities in their upbringing, education, socio-economic background, etc. would all belong to this secret club practicing this forbidden form of law enforcement. Needless to say, I didn't solve it, but I did find some interesting facts that changed my perspective.

The disparity is much higher in the north and north-east, almost non-existent in the south and south-east, and moderate on the west coast. The disparity is also fairly inverse to the concentrations of black populations, with the exception of states with mostly white suburban/rural populations and mostly black urban populations - these latter states, like New York and Illinois, all made the top ten list. The states with the lowest disparities correspond to states with the highest poverty levels - which could mean instead that more affluent states have higher disparities, it's hard to say which is which.

In the west coast, south-west, and west-central regions, methamphetamines are by far the greatest drug threats, and all of these states have much lower disparity rates. All of the states with the highest disparities are cocaine and heroine states. White cocaine use rates are higher by far, and blacks only marginally use more heroine than whites by rate. However, white drug charges are more likely to simply be possession, and there is less associated crime, as black drug charges tend to be more urban, which lends to violence over selling territory and associated prostitution. Also, black dealers are much more likely than white dealers to openly operate a public drug house, instead of selling only to selected clientele (I believe that's simply a matter of the cost of powder cocaine vs the costs of heroine or crack, and the associated neighborhoods related to those drugs). Every state in the top ten highest racial disparity group reported the presence of Colombian drug traffickers, the lowest states did not - again possibly just cocaine related or possibly related to the intricacy level of a state's drug trafficking.

Some of the numbers suggest racial profiling is out of control, some of the data suggest it may not even exist. There are also factors I was unable to find the relevant information I needed, like a breakdown of rural/suburban/urban arrest rates by race. I found a recurring higher conviction rate among black arrests than white - which may be institutionally racist or may be an expression of economic status, e.g. being able to use private lawyers instead of court appointed or taking a case to trial instead of a plea bargain. And while a map of conviction disparity has little in common with a map of americans who never finished high school, it shares most of the major hot-spots as a map of americans who finished less than nine years of school.

Apparently, to a certain degree, "racial profiling" is the practice of targeting poorer, undereducated people in wealthier areas for drug investigations. It's no secret that intercity populations tend to be poorer nor that many intercity populations are disproportionately black. It's also not news that drugs are a big problem in poor areas not that intercity schools have high dropout rates. Lacking the rest of the data I would need to say with any degree of certainty, there is at least a strong set of relationships to start to tie the available data together (data that admittedly comes from a range of different organizations, some of which are the same organizations accused of racial profiling). For me, at least, it's looking more and more like there is a set of influencing forces at work in this issue that don't get the attention they deserve, and there are a lot of possible reasons, racism is a much hotter topic than say, the role underfunded school systems play on the criminal makeup of intercity neighborhoods, or how targeting cocaine instead of methamphetamines in the war on drugs puts more blacks in jail than a fair treatment of the drugs would (but even that may be a matter of fighting that war in big cities instead of the country as a whole).

I'll keep looking, but for now... inconclusive. What have you got?