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A recent report from the U.S. Department of Justice on police in Ferguson, Missouri, is creating a renewed focus nationwide on how law enforcement agencies treat people of different races, and many communities are examining their own data.
In Virginia, crime statistics published by the commonwealth show large disparities in the rates that blacks and whites are arrested for several offenses, including disorderly conduct, trespassing and vagrancy.
Civil rights activists say the numbers are a sign that their decades-long drive for equality in the state is far from over, while representatives of law enforcement say that the numbers do not necessarily point to police bias.
Information on arrests by local and state law enforcement in Virginia is aggregated annually by the State Police, and WAMU 88.5 examined the data from 2013, the most recent year available. (See graphic from WAMU.)
The largest disparity in arrest rates was in nonviolent family offenses, a category that includes nonviolent acts that threaten the physical, mental, or economic well-being of a family member. Almost 70 percent of those arrested were African-American, despite the fact that only 20 percent of the Virginia population is black.
"We have a long history of these disparities that has not been fully addressed," says Johnny Mack, president of Communities Without Boundaries International, a nonprofit activist group. "It's a long process, and it begins with what I think Martin Luther King had in mind when he said that our nation needs to rethink its own values and live up to the meaning of its creed."
Law enforcement responds
Representatives for police say the numbers do not necessarily reflect broad deficiencies in how law enforcement does its job in the state, and that high crime rates among certain populations are often associated with low rates of education and high rates of poverty.
"It can't be just police bias," says Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police. "If people are actually committing crimes and being arrested for committing those crimes, that's not an exercise of police bias. That's just an exercise of police doing their jobs."
Mary Bauer, executive director of the Legal Aid Justice Center, disagrees.
"I think that to say, 'Oh, well, these are people who are conducting criminal activity and engaging in criminal activity more than white people,' that's just not supported by the data,” says Bauer. "The ramifications for people getting arrested at a higher rate ripples so profoundly through the rest of the system with people being disenfranchised from the voter system for spending time in prison."
The conversation created by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last year has also focused new attention on local governments that are funded largely by court fees, a practice that critics say targets poor and minority communities.
Some communities in the rural reaches of Southwest Virginia rely on court fees for almost a quarter of their revenues, such as Wise County and Greensville. That’s not the case in Northern Virginia, though, where taxes on property values are the chief source of local government revenue.
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