6. What Would Martin Luther King, Jr., Say?

0.        U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015), 10–15.

0.        Stop data collected by the Maryland State Police between 1995 and 1997 revealed that 95.6 percent of drivers from whom police requested permission to search gave their consent. Data provided by the Ohio Highway Patrol for 1987–91 and 1995–97 show consent rates of 88.3 percent and 93.1 percent, respectively, for the two periods. Ilya D. Lichtenberg, “Voluntary Consent or Obedience to Authority: An Inquiry into the Consensual Police-Citizen Encounter” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, October 1999), 160–64, 386, Table 7-1). A different study on stops conducted statewide by the Maryland State Police from January 1995 to June 2000 found that police obtained consent to search 96 percent of the time they requested it. Samuel R. Gross and Katherine Y. Barnes, “Road Work: Racial Profiling and Drug Interdiction on the Highway,” Michigan Law Review 101 (2002): 658, 672. When the Illinois State Police sought consent to search as part of a highway interdiction program in 1992, motorists consented more than 98 percent of the time. Chavez v. Illinois State Police, 251 F.3d 612, 621–22 (7th Cir. 2001).

0.        Pamela K. Lattimore et al., Homicide in Eight U.S. Cities: Trends, Context, and Policy Implications (National Institute of Justice, 1997), 14.

0.        U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety in 12 Cities, 1998 (1999), 9.

0.        General Social Survey (GSS), 1994.

0.        Paul Duggan, “D.C. Residents Urged to Care, Join War on Guns,” Washington Post, January 14, 1995.

0.        Ibid.

0.        Ruben Castaneda and David Montgomery, “In King’s Name, a Mandate,” Washington Post, January 17, 1994.

0.        “Jackson Addresses Alabama Prisoners,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 14, 1995.

0.      William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Convocation of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis (November 13, 1993),” Administration of William J. Clinton, 2359.

0.      Ibid., 2360.

0.      Michelle Alexander and Donna Murch have excoriated President Clinton for his role in facilitating mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander, “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” The Nation, February 10, 2016; Donna Murch, “The Clintons’ War on Drugs: When Black Lives Didn’t Matter,” The New Republic, February 9, 2016. Jamelle Bouie has argued that the politics of the 1994 crime bill were complicated, detailing how some African Americans supported the law and others were ambivalent. Jamelle Bouie, “The Messy, Very Human Politics of Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill,” Slate, April 11, 2016.

0.      Duggan, “D.C. Residents Urged to Care.”

0.      Eric Holder interview with Derek McGinty, The Derek McGinty Show, WAMU, November 24, 1994, p. 7.

0.      There have been many Operation Ceasefires around the country, as this is a common name for programs combatting gun violence.

0.      New York Police Department, Police Strategy No. 1, Getting Guns Off the Streets of New York (1994).

0.      Lawrence W. Sherman and Dennis P. Rogan, “Effects of Gun Seizures on Gun Violence: ‘Hot Spots’ Patrol in Kansas City,” Justice Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1995), 680–81.

0.      Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 32.

0.      Edmund F. McGarrell et al., “Reducing Firearms Violence Through Directed Police Patrol,” Criminology and Public Policy 1, no. 1 (2001): 119–48. A New York Times story explained, “Police departments here [Indianapolis] and in Kansas City, Mo., have tried something police departments never did before to get illegal guns off the streets: They have focused on the guns in the way they have long focused on drugs and drunken drivers. Elementary as it sounds, it works.” Fox Butterfield, “A Way to Get the Gunmen: Get the Guns,” New York Times, November 20, 1994.

0.      Nancy Lewis, “Holder Says Gun Campaign Will Enlist 50 Officers; U.S. Attorney to Be Host of Summit This Week,” Washington Post, March 8, 1995.

0.      Both pedestrians and vehicles would be targeted, but Holder said that vehicles would be the principal focus because vehicle searches had proved most fruitful in the Kansas City experiment. Eric Holder interview with Diane Rehm, The Diane Rehm Show, National Public Radio, January 25, 1995, 6–7.

0.      Lewis, “Holder Says Gun Campaign Will Enlist 50 D.C. Officers.”

0.      Nancy Lewis, “Under the Gun: 3rd Police District Squad Gets There First to Get the Weapons Off the Street,” Washington Post, June 16, 1995.

0.      Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), 813. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010), 108; David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press, 1999), 39; Paul Butler, “The White Fourth Amendment,” Texas Tech Law Review 43 (2010): 250.

0.      Holder interview with Rehm, 6.

0.      Though he did elsewhere. In an interview with the Washington Post reporter Nancy Lewis, Holder said police would focus on heavily tinted windows. According to Lewis, Holder’s Operation Ceasefire would “target vehicles, especially those in violation of safety standards, such as being operated with improper lights or heavily tinted windows, as well as pedestrians who meet a specific profile that might indicate that they are carrying a weapon.” Nancy Lewis, “Special Teams to Draw Bead on Illegal DC Guns,” Washington Post, June 6, 1995.

0.      Holder interview with Rehm, 6–7.

0.      Ibid., 7.

0.      In 1973 the Supreme Court held that police need not inform drivers of their right to refuse to be searched. Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218 (1973).

0.      Charles Remsberg, Tactics for Criminal Patrol: Vehicle Stops, Drug Discovery and Officer Survival (Calibre Press, 1995), 212, 215.

0.      American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, “CPD Traffic Stops in 2013: Searches of Cars by Consent: Contraband Finds Per Search, by Type,” December 2014; Sgt. Greg Stewart and Emily Covelli, “Stops Data Collection: The Portland Police Bureau’s Response to the Criminal Justice Policy and Research Institute’s Recommendations,” Portland Police Bureau, February 13, 2014; Larry K. Gaines, “An Analysis of Traffic Stop Data in Riverside, California,” Police Quarterly 9, no. 2 (June 2006): 210, 216, 224, 225.

0.      Remsberg, Tactics for Criminal Patrol, 69.

0.      Sherman and Rogan, “Effects of Gun Seizures on Gun Violence,” 683; McGarrell et al., “Reducing Firearms Violence,” 131, Table 2.

0.      In the Chicago study from 2013, while police found weapons in 0.5 percent of consent searches, they found drugs in 9.5 percent of consent searches; and 83.3 percent of the time drugs were found, the amounts were small (ten grams or less). In Portland, police retrieved weapons in 4.7 percent of all searches and drugs in 22.0 percent of all searches. And in Riverside, California, police found weapons in 1.1 percent of searches and drugs in 8.4 percent. (In all three cities, cars driven by whites were significantly more likely to be found with drugs in them than those driven by blacks or Hispanics.) ACLU of Illinois, “CPD Traffic Stops in 2013”; Stewart and Covelli, “Stops Data Collection,” 27, Table 21; Larry Gaines, “An Analysis,” 225, Table 7.

0.      Lewis, “Holder Says Gun Campaign Will Enlist 50 D.C. Officers”; Ruben Castaneda, “DC Tops States in Arrests for Weapon Offenses, U.S. Says,” Washington Post, November 13, 1995.

0.      Metropolitan Police Department, MPDC 1998 Annual Report: Investing in Public Safety for Today and Tomorrow (1999), 19.

0.      DeNeen Brown, “District Weekly: A Suburb Thrives in the City but Despite Affluence, Ward 3 Faces Problems,” Washington Post, June 16, 1994.

0.      Robert L. Wilkins, “Comments of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia Concerning Public Oversight Hearing on the Impact of the Joint Gun Initiative Conducted by the Metropolitan Police Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” October 25, 1995, p. 2.

0.      Ibid., 3.

0.      Councilman Bill Lightfoot worried that the gun squads were targeting young black men. Nancy Lewis, “Officials Say D.C. Anti-Gun Program Seems to Be Working,” Washington Post, October 26, 1995.

0.      Wade Henderson, “NAACP Washington Lobby: More Than Just Black and White,” About … Time Magazine, October 31, 1994.

0.      Lenese C. Herbert, “Et in Arcadia Ego: A Perspective on Black Prosecutors’ Loyalty Within the American Criminal Justice System,” Howard Law Journal 49 (2005): 513.

0.      Paul Butler, “Brotherman: Reflections of a Reformed Prosecutor,” in Ellis Cose, ed., The Darden Dilemma (HarperPerennial, 1997), 1–2.

0.      Bill Gifford, “Good Cop: Eric Holder, Liberal Crime-Fighter,” The New Republic, May 1, 1995, 16.

0.      Robert E. Pierre, “Police Hail the Success of Gun Drive,” Washington Post, July 18, 1996.

0.      Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Color of Suspicion,” New York Times, June 20, 1999.

0.      Michael Isikoff and Tracy Thompson, “Getting Too Tough on Drugs: Draconian Sentences Hurt Small Offenders More Than Kingpins,” Washington Post, November 4, 1990.

0.      Ron Harris, “Blacks Feel Brunt of Drug War,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1990.

0.      David Cole, “The Paradox of Race and Crime: A Comment on Randall Kennedy’s ‘Politics of Distinction,’” Georgetown Law Journal 83 (1995): 2562, note 68; Charisse Jones, “Crack and Punishment: Is Race the Issue?” New York Times, October 28, 1995.

0.      Nkechi Taifa, “Laying Down the Law, Race by Race,” Legal Times, October 10, 1994.

0.      See chapter 2, “Black Lives Matter.”

0.      Benjamin Levin is a must-read on this topic. Levin demonstrates how liberals, including many racial justice advocates, have come to see guns as a category unto themselves, one to which none of the normal over-punishment concerns apply. Benjamin Levin, “Guns and Drugs,” Fordham Law Review 84 (2016): 2173.

0.      Paul Duggan, “D.C. Votes More Leeway for Judges; Mandatory Sentences in Drug Cases Altered,” Washington Post, December 7, 1994.

0.      “United States: Call in the Feds,” The Economist (April 3, 1999); Daniel C. Richman, “Project Exile and the Allocation of Federal Law Enforcement Authority,” Arizona Law Review 43, no. 2 (2001): 369–412.

0.      Frank Lynn, “New Yorkers Face a Busy Election Day,” New York Times, November 6, 1988. In October 1990 Johnson told the Amsterdam News that “we are sending many cases to federal courts where gun and drug convictions have a five-year mandatory sentence.” Jesse H. Walker, “Bronx DA Defends Self, Office and His Borough,” Amsterdam News, October 13, 1990; Bob Kappstatter, “DA Guns for More 1-Year Terms,” Daily News, September 29, 1995.

0.      In 1997, Paul Butler brilliantly and poignantly described being singled out for surveillance by black officers while walking three blocks from his home in a well-off, integrated D.C. neighborhood. Paul Butler, “Walking While Black,” Legal Times, November 10, 1997.

0.      Ronald Weitzer, Stephen Tuch, and Wesley Skogan, “Police–Community Relations in a Majority-Black City,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 45, no. 4 (2008): 419; Ronald Weitzer, “Citizens’ Perceptions of Police Misconduct: Race and Neighborhood Context,” Justice Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1999): 820–22.

0.      Ronald Weitzer, interview by author, March 10, 2014.

0.      Weitzer, “Citizens’ Perceptions of Police Misconduct,” 830.

0.      Ibid., 841–42.

0.      Ibid., 841.

0.      David K. Shipler, The Rights of the People (Knopf, 2011), 48, 57.

0.      Ibid., 72–73. The Gun Recovery Unit had distilled its philosophy down to a simple, if remarkable, idea. According to the unit’s training material, “[F]or too long police officers have been trained to view the Constitution of the United States and its judicial interpretations as placing rigid restrictions on what law enforcement can do on the street while shielding criminals from detection.” Instead, the Constitution should be understood “as a law enforcement sword rather than a shield.” Ibid., 41.

0.      Police Reform Organizing Project, Nearly 2,000,000 Per Year Punitive Interactions Between the NYPD and New Yorkers, August 2015, 3,5.

0.      Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel, Pulled Over, 13–14, 65–66, 72.

0.      Ibid., 14, 72–73.

0.      Ibid., 67, figure 3.3.

0.      Ibid.

0.      Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Color of Suspicion.”

0.      I do not suggest that this is the only source of disparity. Rather, my claim is that this is a source of disparity, and one that police are uniquely positioned to correct.