How Trump Is Quietly Making It Easier for People of Color to Get Arrested

Trump’s Justice Department is ramping up racist drug war policies through undisclosed law enforcement recommendations.

trump
WikiCommons

Image via Michael Vadon

trump

As President Trump’s condoning of white supremacist violence in Charlotteville continues to provoke widespread public outrage, Trump’s administration wages a quieter war against Black and brown communities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is redoubling drug war policies that have long been proven to deepen racial inequality while doing nothing to decrease what he calls "staggering" violence in America's cities.

Racist policies are no big surprise coming from Sessions, but that doesn’t make the situation less alarming. A man with a long legacy of racist comments and law enforcement stances is now directing our nation’s justice department. We have an Attorney General who previously made the “joke” that, “I thought those guys [the Ku Klux Klan] were OK until I learned they smoked pot.” Sessions’ disgusting, racist joke also highlights what seems to be an obsessive focus on marijuana, despite the lack of evidence linking its recreational use or legalization to violence.

In June, Sessions held a closed-door convening of law enforcement officials in the newly created Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety to discuss the future of policing and criminal justice in the US. The task force passed along their recommendations to Sessions on July 27, but he has not released them to the American public. Although they will be shaping the direction of the American legal system for years to come, the membership of the task force is also secret. Sessions stated he will implement their recommendations on a "rolling basis"—apparently with no opportunity for scrutiny from elected officials or the public.

Sessions has already instructed prosecutors to seek the harshest sentences in drug cases and return to mandatory minimum sentencing, undoing the Obama Administration’s moves toward reducing sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. Following another recommendation from the task force, Sessions has also announced he will increase the use of civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize property and cash from individuals, regardless of whether they have been charged or convicted of any crime. This wildly abused practice is disproportionately used to steal property from poor communities of color.

So, what do maximum sentences mean? Under federal laws, maximum sentences mean individuals can be sentenced to five years for possessing any amount of marijuana for their first nonviolent offense, and ten years for their second. For selling 50 kg of weed, the maximum sentence is 20 years. For a first nonviolent drug trafficking charge of a small quantity of drugs such as cocaine and heroine, the sentence can be up to 40 years, and life in prison for a second offense.

Ramping up broken windows policing (which promotes cracking down on petty crimes like marijuana possession) will have tangible ramifications for Black Americans—ruining lives and widening racial inequality. Recent history shows that lengthy sentences for nonviolent drug and poverty related crimes function to discriminate against Black and brown communities, trapping vulnerable individuals in America’s cycle of criminalization and incarceration, and leaving these communities with even less economic resources and familial support systems.

The evidence that Black and white Americans use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates is clear, with the National Research Council stating that the racial difference in drug use is “not substantial,” and that “there is also little evidence... that blacks sell drugs more often than whites.” Yet from 1995 to 2005, 36 percent of those arrested on drug charges were Black, along with 46 percent of those convicted of drug crimes. African Americans make up just 13 percent of the general population, demonstrating that discriminatory law enforcement and sentencing lands more Black people in jail for drug offenses. Eighty percent of drug arrests are for possession alone, revealing how little this has to do with violence reduction or rooting out gang activity.

Sessions and Trump are turning back the clock on the limited progress made to end racially discriminatory policing and sentencing. At the same time, Trump's proposed budget cuts financing for substance abuse services by $109 million while increasing funding for the Drug Enforcement Agency by $150 million.

Along every step of the road to incarceration, Black folks are targeted. This now stands to get worse instead of better. Police are three times as likely to stop and search Black drivers as white drivers. Once arrested, judges are more likely to charge Black defendants bail for comparable crimes to white defendants, and African Americans are more likely to remain in jail awaiting trial because they cannot pay bail.

Conversations on the harms of broken windows policing often focus on men, but women of color are also hurt by the drug war. The rate of female incarceration has shot up by 700 percent in the past three decades, with the vast majority of women being imprisoned for nonviolent offenses. Black women are most harshly impacted, comprising 44 percent of the US women’s jail population, but only 13 percent of the general women’s population.

The consequences of a racist criminal justice system do not end with folks serving unnecessary prison terms. Being formerly incarcerated can mean being disenfranchised of your right to vote, being unable to qualify for government support for your family, and being discriminated against by employers. This affects not only the individuals involved but also their communities. Black communities, which have already experienced hundreds of years of economic exploitation dating back to slavery, are left with less support and an ever wider economic gap.

When the Department of Justice supports racially discriminatory law enforcement, this encourages local jurisdictions to double down on racist policy and practice. For instance, a recently enacted law in Republican-controlled Missouri, which the NAACP has dubbed “the Jim Crow bill,” will make it much more difficult to litigate lawsuits alleging racial discrimination. Racist policies and rhetoric from the federal government also embolden extralegal extremist hate, which we witnessed as neo-Nazis violently descended on Charlottesville last month to protect Confederate symbols of white supremacy.

Incarceration rates have finally started to decline in the past few years, but with Sessions’ return to the drug war, this trend could be reversed. We don’t know what dangerous recommendations Sessions will incorporate into our Justice Department’s agenda going forward. What we do know is that this administration is determined to lock up and terrorize people of color, with the office that is supposed to protect equal rights and justice for all leading the attack.

Latest in Life