Also worth reading this:
https://news.wttw.com/2019/04/11/how-black-leaders-unintenti...> As I passed them, I noticed another racial reality. It wasn’t only Brandon and the other young men in the cellblock who were black. So was everybody in the courtroom—not just the judge, but the court reporter, the bailiff, and the juvenile prosecutor. So was the police officer who had arrested Brandon, not to mention the police chief and the mayor. Even the building we were in—the H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse, named after the city’s first black chief judge—was a reminder of the African American influence on D.C.’s legal system.
> This wasn’t my first time in an all-black D.C. courtroom, but something—probably my anger at the Martin Luther King speech—made the reality stand out that day. When I got back to my office, I continued the racial tally. I had been to the detention facility that would be Brandon’s new home more times than I wanted to count, and I knew that all the guards there were black, too. The city council that wrote the gun and drug laws Brandon had been convicted of violating was majority African American and had been so for more than twenty-five years. In cases that went to trial, the juries were often majority black. Even some of the federal officials involved in D.C.’s criminal justice system were African American, including Eric Holder, then the city’s chief prosecutor.
> In September 2014, the Sentencing Project issued a report comparing the attitudes of whites and blacks regarding crime and criminal justice policy. It found that when Americans were asked, “Do you think the courts in this area deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals?” more whites (73 percent) than blacks (64 percent) said “not harshly enough.” Media coverage of the report emphasized what the Sentencing Project called “the racial gap in punitiveness.” But the fact that almost two-thirds of blacks displayed such punitive attitudes received little notice. How could it be that even after forty years of tough-on-crime tactics, with their attendant toll on black America, 64 percent of African Americans still thought the courts were not harsh enough?
One of the ways we “otherize” African Americans is by denying that, just like white people, they want secure neighborhoods. And because they disproportionately live in poor neighborhoods, they are disproportionately affected by crime.