Woman in ravine: A victim of police assumptions?

Who is victimized when police prematurely close in on the wrong suspect?

The suspect, of course.

I am writing from the Confessions and Interrogations conference in El Paso, where we heard yesterday from one such man. I've previously posted about Jeffrey Deskovic. Amazingly, he was convicted of a schoolmate's murder at age 16 despite DNA evidence of his innocence. He spent 16 years behind bars. He exhausted all of his appeals, and was freed last year only thanks to the random intervention of the Innocence Project and a new district attorney in his home county who was willing to re-test the DNA. He still looks a little dazed to be out. (As an aside, he is finishing up his bachelor's degree so that he can go on to law school, and his sole source of income comes from speaking engagements. He's an excellent speaker, so think about inviting him to your venue to discuss his case.)

But there are other types of victims who may not immediately come to mind.

How about all the women who are raped and murdered by the bad guys who remain on the loose? The serial rapist-killer in Deskovic's case went on to commit more violent crimes against women, as do many of the others, including the real perpetrators in the Central Park Jogger and the Norfolk Four cases.

There is another type of victim who is even less likely to come to mind.

Tanya Rider is an example of this type of victim. She went off the road while driving home from work one night, and spent the next eight days trapped in her car in a steep ravine near Renton, Washington.

What does she have to do with wrongful conviction?

Her husband learned about her rescue while sitting at the sheriff's station, waiting to take a polygraph examination. When he reported her missing, police turned the case into a criminal investigation with him as the prime suspect, he said today on national TV. This delayed and weakened the efforts to search for Tanya by several days, almost costing the young woman her life, he claims. And, if Tanya had not been found, he might well have become yet another in the growing list of wrongfully convicted.

She, meanwhile, remains hospitalized in critical condition. And, in another sign of the times, the couple has no medical insurance.

Ambiguous laws increase likelihood of racial profiling

The data are in, and – no surprise:

• Police do sometimes engage in racial profiling.
  

• People in general do sometimes engage in racist behaviors under ambiguous situations in which they can rationalize their decisions in some other way.
  

With those data in mind, here’s a great idea: Let's pass ambiguous new laws and see how they are enforced.

That's just what municipalities around the country are doing, in a recipe for increasing racially discriminatory arrest patterns.

Take "sagging."

Atlanta, the hip hop capital of the South and perhaps the world, is currently debating whether to follow other cities around the country that have enacted laws against wearing baggy pants that show one's undergarments. The ordinance would impose fines and even jail time for violators.

The ACLU of Georgia says that is unconstitutional. The issue is not just about baggy pants, but about the criminalization of young black men, says ACLU executive director Debbie Seagraves: "We are talking about creating one more ordinance, one more law that can be used to put more and more young black people into a system that is already eating them up."

Not so, says C.T. Martin, the 70-year-old city councilman who proposed the law.

"My legislation is designed to help young people, to enlighten them and help them understand," said Martin. "When the police pull you over, you can't say they are profiling you. You've already profiled yourself."

Would it surprise you to learn that Martin is a longtime African-American activist?

Not if you are familiar with the research on unconscious racism, which shows that African American police and probation officers, for example, are just as likely as anyone else to make racist judgments about black criminal suspects. What's ominous is that the underlying racist stereotypes are not conscious, so people don't even know they're relying on them.

Or, as another example of ambiguous laws, take anti-gang injunctions.

On the opposite side of the country from Atlanta, progressive San Francisco is enacting anti-gang injunctions that bar people named on a gang list from congregating, wearing gang symbols or clothing, or flashing gang signs in certain geographic areas. The injunctions, already in place but currently being expanded, also impose a 10 p.m. to sunrise curfew on these individuals, under penalty of jail.

Remember the research about racist behavior being most likely to occur under ambiguous circumstances in which it can be rationalized away?

Well, with gang signs and symbols constantly changing, police will be given the leeway to interpret which hand signals, clothing, or other symbols constitute evidence of membership in the Norteños and other gangs.

Criminal defense attorneys opposing the injunction argued in court that some of the people named on the list are not in gangs and are being targeted because they live in public housing or have rapped about gangster life.

Robert Amparán, who is representing four men on the list, went so far as to call the injunction "government-sponsored racial profiling" that gives police sweeping power to harass and arrest Latino men.

While that may be true, the social science data on modern racism predict that those involved will rationalize any racist conduct on other grounds. After all, no one in these modern times wants to be seen – or even to see themselves – as a racist.

Photo credit: "CR Artist" (Creative Commons license)

Attorney Neil Richards comments on the constitutionality of baggy-pants laws at the Concurring Opinions blog. The Chicago Tribune has a news analysis of those ordinances.

The San Francisco Chronicle provides coverage of the debacle over San Francisco's anti-gang injunctions.

Research data on unconscious racial stereotyping among police and probation officers includes: Graham, S., & Lowery, B.S. (2004). Priming Unconscious Racial Stereotypes About Adolescent Offenders. Law and Human Behavior, 28, 483-504.

CA could lead in criminal justice reform

Three bills on Governor's desk

Three of the most common causes of wrongful conviction are mistaken eyewitness identification, false confessions, and fabricated statements of informants.

California is poised to address all three of those problems, through major criminal justice reform bills now sitting on the Governor's desk. The bills would:

• require electronic recording of police interrogations in serious felony cases (Senate Bill 511)

• appoint a task force to draft guidelines for police line-up procedures to increase the accuracy of eyewitness identifications (Senate Bill 756)

• require the corroboration of testimony from jailhouse informants (Senate Bill 609)

The ACLU of Northern California has a quick and easy online form that allows people to send a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging him to make California a leader in criminal justice reform by signing these bills into law.

Special issue on racial profiling and the law

The August 2007 issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice focuses on racial profiling in the criminal justice system. The abstracts are free; you must either pay or have a subscription to read the articles in their entirety.

The contents include:

• Profiles of Injustice: The Theory and Practice of Racial Profiling - Zina T. McGee

• Racial Profiling and the Courts: An Empirical Analysis of Federal Litigation, 1991 to 2006 - Shaun L. Gabbidon, Lakiesha N. Marzette, and Steven A. Peterson

• Police Discourse on Racial Profiling - Karen S. Glover

• Racial Profiling and Postmodern Society: Police Responsiveness, Image Maintenance, and the Left Flank of Police Legitimacy - Kirk Miller

• Legislative and Court Decisions That Promulgated Racial Profiling: A Sociohistorical Perspective - Larry D. Stokes

• Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling - Kelly Welch

Thanks to the always informative Psychology and Crime News blog for alerting me to this important volume.

Senator Craig: "The breastplate of righteousness"

Much of the public debate surrounding Larry Craig's arrest centers on whether the senator is "gay." This completely misses the boat.

Back in the 1960s, a sociologist named Laud Humphreys conducted groundbreaking research into bathroom sex, or so-called "tearoom trade." He watched men engaging in sex in 19 public restrooms around St. Louis, Missouri. He surreptitiously noted their license plate numbers and later knocked on their doors in the guise of conducting an innocuous social sciences survey.

His findings, confirmed in more recent research, are that most of the men were married, religious, socially conservative, and heterosexually identified.

In other words, they were just like Senator Craig.

In fact, married men who engage in public sex are not only conservative; they often exhibit an exaggerated form of propriety. They drive late-model cars that are clean and polished, they maintain well-manicured lawns, they are impeccably groomed and dressed, and they attend church regularly. In short, they present themselves as proper, moral, and pious.

Although public sex is risky for these men, it allows them to maintain this veneer, which Humphreys labeled the "breastplate of righteousness."

As Humphreys' research demonstrated, public sex has been around a long time, and it is pervasive. Police have been stymied in their efforts to eradicate or even reduce it. In response to this longstanding dilemma, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) has published an interesting manual on how to control such "illicit sexual activity in public places."

An innovative solution proposed in the manual, which only works if a community is amenable, is to tolerate some amount of public sexual behavior in clearly delineated areas, as is the practice in certain European communities.

Less effective, the manual cautions, is the decoy approach used on Craig:

"While using undercover officers to pose as interested parties in illicit same-sex public activity can lead to many arrests, such operations have not had long-term effectiveness in reducing overall activity levels. At best, they temporarily displace the activity to other locations, and the activity usually returns to prior levels once the operations have ceased. Further, given the active role that undercover officers must take to confirm suspects' intentions, the police may be vulnerable to entrapment claims. In addition, many officers are reluctant to serve as decoys because of the customary behavioral scripts they must follow. Finally, some may see the serious social consequences of the publicity following an arrest as disproportionate to the severity of the offense."

For a social science perspective on the Craig scandal and its relevance to issues of sexual identity, denial, and prejudice, see Gregory Herek's insightful blog post, "Tearooms, Labels, and Double Standards."


Photo credit: cybertoad (Creative Commons license)

Additional resources:

Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places. New York: Aldine Publishing Co.

Johnson, Kelly Dedel. Illicit Sexual Activity in Public Places. 2005. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Nardi, P.M. (1995). "The Breastplate of Righteousness": Twenty-Five Years After Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Journal of Homosexuality, 30, 1-10.

Desroches, F.J. (1990). Tearoom Trade: A Research Update. Qualitative Sociology, 13, 39-61.

Dignan, J. 2004. Manhunt. Sacramento News & Review, (2004).

Frankis, J., & Flowers, P. (2005). Men who have sex with men in public sex environments: A systematic review of quantitative literature. AIDS Care, 17, 273-288.

The Wall Street Journal's online edition links to the above post.

Pioneering police psychologist (and In the News subscriber) retiring

From the Modesto (Calif.) Bee:

In the mid-1970s, Phil Trompetter decided he needed a better understanding of what the police officers he knew experienced every day in the field.

At the time, Trompetter was a clinical psychologist for Stanislaus County's mental health department. The laws had changed. The center could take in only those deemed a danger to themselves or the public. The rules created a tension between the mental health staff and the cops because some people clearly in need of help could not be held for treatment. They were back out on the streets, where the police were left to deal with them.

"The relationship between law enforcement and mental health was horrible," he said. "So I decided to start riding patrol with our (sheriff's) deputies, to listen to their stories, and explaining to them what's happening."

That was the beginning of his 30-year career as the shrink to law enforcement officers in Stanislaus County, a ride that made him a key player in every major critical incident here during that time, including the shooting death of an 11-year-old during a law enforcement raid and the Peterson case.

It's a ride that is coming to an end because he sold the police psychology part of his practice and is retiring, or at least semiretiring.

Trompetter, 63, will maintain the forensic psychology element of his downtown Modesto practice, continuing to evaluate defendants and suspects while serving as an expert witness in the courts.

The rest of the interesting story of Dr. Trompetter’s career is online at the Modesto Bee.

Harmful effects of unintentional racism

Research on racism has come a long way since the old days of searching for the “racist personality.” In recent years, researchers have focused on the subtle, modern racism that pervades our culture and that perpetrators can plausibly deny.

Individuals who practice this subtle racism may not even know it. They may believe in fair and equal treatment for all, yet unconsciously harbor negative feelings toward other races. Becoming anxious and uncomfortable in interracial interactions, they adhere to formal rules of behavior while expressing their negative feelings in subtle ways that can be denied or rationalized.

The implications extend into the forensic realm. Studies of police and probation officers show that they often use racial cues to assign blame. An African American who commits a crime is likely to be seen as inherently bad or criminal, while a white person who commits a similar crime is more likely to be excused based on external factors, such as peer influence, poor parenting, or mental illness. Recommended punishments differ accordingly, resulting in greater likelihood of arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment for African Americans.

The unconscious nature of these biases helps to explain divergent rates of arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment despite a lack of conscious racist intent on the part of criminal justice professionals. (Other forces, of course, include persisting economic equalities.) Interestingly, the race of the professional is irrelevant. African American police and probation officers engage in just as much negative racial stereotyping of African Americans as do whites.

Research continues to flesh out the specifics of modern racism. Now come two new studies, one about its pervasiveness and the other about its harmful effects.

The current issue of the American Psychologist reports on “racial microaggressions,” which are defined as everyday indignities, often unintentional, that communicate hostile or derogatory feelings toward racial minorities. Such microaggressions are divided into microassaults (purposeful discrimination or name-calling), microinsults (rudeness and insensitivity), and microinvalidation (exclusion or negation).

The invisibility and deniability of these subtle forms of racism make them especially problematic. The recipient must try to decide whether the offensive behavior was deliberate or unintentional. If the recipient confronts the aggressor, he or she is typically labeled as oversensitive or even paranoid.

The current issue of the American Journal of Public Health reports that subtle racism is more psychologically damaging than overt discrimination. Whereas recipients can “shrug off” overt discrimination, subtle racism is more likely to be committed by colleagues, neighbors, or friends. As such, it causes recipients to feel that people do not like or accept them, thereby lowering self esteem and leading to depression.

Similar research with African Americans has found that subtle racism is most damaging to their physical health.

Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C., Torino, G., Bucceri, J., Holder, A., Nadal, K., & Esquilin, M. “Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice.” American Psychologist, May-June 2007, Volume 62 #4, pp. 271-286.

Noh, S., Kaspar, V., Wickrama, K, “Overt and subtle racial discrimination and mental health: preliminary findings for Korean immigrants.” American Journal of Public Health, July 2007, Volume 97 #7.