The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and the use of excessive force by the local police
department is a major news story.
Racial inequality is at the heart of this conflict and there are numerous ways that
this inequality can be measurably illustrated to prove that.
One way is to look at inequality of representation, which is the relationship between the demographics
of a community and how they are represented in government.
If the majority of your community is African American but the majority of your elected
officials and police officers are not, that is inequality of representation.
And right now it is a huge problem in Ferguson.
67% percent of the residents are African American but the positions of authority are almost
entirely held by white people.
94% of the police force is white.
5 out of 6 city councilman are white, the Mayor is white.
And every single member of the school board is white.
That is a huge disparity in representation and gives African Americans little to no direct
input into how their community is run.
It also establishes a pretty terrible us versus them dynamic.
A dynamic made worse by an enormous financial divide.
In predominantly African American Ferguson, the median household income is $37,517, which
is around ten thousand dollars less than the median household income in the rest of State
and much lower than the median household income nationally.
This is inequality of resources and it doesn’t just affect personal income, it also affects
things like education and health care.
Low income communities have a high school dropout rate 4.5 times higher and a level
of health care that is 80% worse than that of high income communities.
Two factors that make it much harder for a community to work its way out of poverty.
Another factor at play here is the inequality of enforcement.
There is ample proof that law enforcement profiles African Americans, which is a polite
way of saying that they actively target African Americans for investigation and arrest solely
based on the color of their skin.
This point is central to what is happening in Ferguson right now.
Last year, more than 85% of all drivers stopped by Ferguson police were African American.
And 12.1 percent of those drivers were searched.
This is important because white drivers were only searched 6.9 percent of the time.
Contraband was found 34 percent of the time when the driver was white and only 22 percent
of the time when the driver was African American.
And that’s not even the biggest disparity. 93% of the people arrested by Ferguson Police
last year were African American.
Which some would take as proof of a huge disparity in how African Americans are treated by police.
Add to all of this the the murder of Oscar Grant by Police in Oakland, the murder of
Eric Garner by the NYPD and numerous other similar incidents, and it’s easy to see
a pattern of racially-motivated police violence worthy of protest.
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