Racial Disparity Among Women and Men

• In Event: Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Recent attempts to reduce racial disparity in arrests have involved calling for reduced prosecution of crimes that have the largest racial disparities, such as drug possession. However, analyses of which arrest categories show the greatest racial disparity are largely responsive to disparities between men of different races, because the vast majority of people arrested each year by US police departments are men. This paper investigates whether the differing construction of Black women and Black men led to differing patterns of racial disparity in arrest between women and men. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the source relied upon by most studies of racial disparity in US policing, only report arrests by race and gender, but not their intersection. Therefore I rely on annual reports from the Saint Louis and San Francisco police departments in the mid-20th century.

Author

• Andrew James McCall, University of Chicago