That is right, out of all youth arrested, a disproportionate number of them Black, 78% were never charged with a crime.
So racist officers in our racist culture punish youth by dragging them away in chains and placing them in cages when in 78% of those cases those youth have committed absolutely no crime.
“Shockingly,” the report also says, more than half of those arrests did not lead to charges or further involvement by probation officials. Black kids represented 78 percent of the youths whose arrests were not “sustained” in the end, according to an analysis of information obtained by the report’s authors.
Data also showed, the report said, that 72 percent of calls from schools to the Oakland Unified School District’s own police force were requests to respond to allegations of “non-criminal conduct” by students or others. Only 28 percent of calls were requests to respond to allegations of drugs, alcohol, weapons, crimes involving property or crimes against a person.
“This raises questions about the appropriate role of police in our schools,” the report says. “Why are police being called for so many non-serious incidents, situations that may be better handled by counselors, administrators, school staff or parent volunteers?”
School to prison pipeline? Or our culture's version of disappearing those that do not conform?
On average, male youth made up 60 percent of these low-level arrests each year. Even more alarming, while Black youth comprise only 29.3 percent of the total Oakland school-aged youth population, they comprise 78.6 percent of the total arrests for low-level offenses during the seven- year period;53 an average 76.9 percent of these arrests per year.
This means that Black youth were arrested at more than two-and-a-half times their percentage in the population. “Hispanic” youth had the next highest arrest rate; while they are 38 percent of the total Oakland youth population, they constituted 14.6 percent of the total arrests. White youth, who are 13 percent of Oakland’s youth population, comprise only 3.7 percent of arrests for low-level offenses.
Based on all reported OPD arrests from 2006-2012, and compared to the 2010 US Census data, Black youth were five times more likely than Hispanic youth, almost 12 times more likely than White youth to be arrested. Taken together, Black youth were six times more likely to be arrested than any other ethnic group. This data would be troubling even if the majority of arrests were sustained. But it turns out that many of them are not.
The traumatic experience of being arrested in our culture where police verbally abuse as well as physically abuse their charges makes these numbers even more alarming.