“They’ll stop them just for being black,” a 39-year-old African American woman named Holly told me last August, describing how police in and around her home town of Ferguson, Missouri, treated young black men. “I’ve actually stood there and watched cousins of mine get pulled over. [The police] would sit them down, pat them down, even after they knew they had the wrong person. I have so many of those stories.”
I met Holly across the street from the Ferguson police precinct, where protesters had gathered following the killing of 19-year-old Michael Brown last August. Like many of the protesters I met in Ferguson, she had come out to protest police abuses — including traffic stops, citations, and arrests disproportionately targeted at African Americans — that long predated the Brown shooting.
Whether in Ferguson or elsewhere in the country, communities of color fully recognize that there is a problem with race in policing in the United States. A recent Gallup poll showed that blacks have much less confidence in police than whites. Given this divide, it is not surprising that building consensus on this issue is sometimes difficult. Exacerbating this problem is the fact that no one has systematically collected reliable data on race and policing on a national level. A number of recent reports highlight that gap as the first step in understanding why problems with race in policing tenaciously persist.
