Deadly Injustice

Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System

Devon Johnson, Amy Farrell, Patricia Y. Warren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479802388
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin and the subsequent trial and acquittal of his assailant, George Zimmerman, sparked a passionate national debate about race and criminal justice in America that involved everyone from bloggers to mayoral candidates to President Obama himself. With increased attention to these causes, from St. Louis to Los Angeles, intense outrage at New York City’s Stop and Frisk program and escalating anger over the effect of mass incarceration on the nation’s African American community, the Trayvon Martin case brought the racialized nature of the American justice system to the forefront of our national consciousness. Deadly Injustice uses the Martin/Zimmerman case as a springboard to examine race, crime, and justice in our current criminal justice system. Contributors explore how race and racism informs how Americans think about criminality, how crimes are investigated and prosecuted, and how the media interprets and reports on crime. At the center of their analysis sit examples of the Zimmerman trial and Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, providing current and resonant examples for readers as they work through the bigger-picture problems plaguing the American justice system. This important volume demonstrates how highly publicized criminal cases go on to shape public views about offenders, the criminal process, and justice more generally, perpetuating the same unjust cycle for future generations. A timely, well-argued collection, Deadly Injustice is an illuminating, headline-driven text perfect for students and scholars of criminology and an important contribution to the discussion of race and crime in America.

PART I

Who Is in Danger?

1

Profiling Trayvon

Young Black Males, Suspicion, and Surveillance

JACINTA M. GAU AND KAREEM L. JORDAN

On February 26, 2012, the police dispatch center in Sanford, Florida, received a call. The caller, George Zimmerman, block watch coordinator for his gated community, told the dispatcher that there was a suspicious person walking through the neighborhood. The purported suspect was a young black male sporting a hooded sweatshirt who appeared, to Zimmerman, to be ambling aimlessly down the sidewalk. In fact, the individual was seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin and he was visiting his father, who resided in the neighborhood. Martin was returning to his father’s home after completing a snack run to a local convenience store. He was chatting on his cell phone with a friend. He was unarmed. Zimmerman, apparently convinced that the teenager was an imminent threat to neighborhood security, concealed his handgun on his person, entered his car, and, ignoring the dispatcher’s admonitions that his actions were unnecessary, began following Martin. At this point in the story, the details get murky. There were no direct witnesses, so the narrative had to be cobbled together with bits and pieces of accounts from a variety of sources. The only clear fact is that the two ended up embroiled in a physical struggle and that Trayvon Martin died when George Zimmerman, fearing he was losing the fight, shot Martin in the abdomen. Several months later, Zimmerman was tried for second-degree murder; the six-person jury acquitted him. They were unconvinced that Zimmerman’s actions amounted to anything more than a tragic but understandable mistake, or that Martin did not somehow bring his demise upon himself.

The Martin-Zimmerman case raises a multitude of thorny issues about race, Florida’s broad self-defense statutes, and the role of the media and advocacy groups in the delivery of justice. The present chapter analyzes the actions of Zimmerman and jury as being situated within a larger culture of suspicion aimed at young black males. Zimmerman’s actions against Martin—and the jury’s subsequent leniency toward Zimmerman—can be viewed as microcosms of the prevalent assumption nationwide that black males are inherently unpredictable and dangerous. This assumption is the foundation for police policies that encourage—whether explicitly or as a (predictable) side effect—enhanced police scrutiny of members of this group, and is also evident in the tendency for juries to treat black defendants with particular severity. Public opinion studies have revealed widespread bias—be it overt or latent—against young black males. This bias, endemic to (white) society, perpetuates racialized justice system activities, and these activities, in turn, feed public opinion by making these biases seem factual and justified. Viewed through the lens of a racially stratified society, Zimmerman’s actions and those of the jury seem unremarkable, perhaps even inevitable.

The Subtext of Racial Profiling: Symbolic Assailants and the Accoutrements of the Criminal

A pioneering study of police officers’ habits, preferences, and styles in performing their jobs introduced the notion of the symbolic assailant:1 “Police officers, because their work requires them to be occupied continually with potential violence, develop a perceptual shorthand to identify certain kinds of people as symbolic assailants, that is, as persons who use gestures, language, and attire that the police have come to recognize as a prelude to violence. This does not mean that violence by a symbolic assailant is necessarily predictable. On the contrary, the police officer responds to the vague indication of danger suggested by appearance.” This “perceptual shorthand” allows experienced police officers to quickly organize large quantities of incoming information, much of it ambiguous, into predefined categories of “threatening” and “nonthreatening.” When a potential suspect’s behavioral cues do not allow officers to determine immediately that the person is a threat, proxy indicators (e.g., race, sex, age, clothing style) are substituted for more direct measures of character and intent. Police then infer dangerousness on the basis of outward symbols that they have come to equate with unpredictability and violence.

While there is nothing inherently insidious about perceptual shorthand (what social psychologists would call heuristic devices, experience-based learning that permits new information to be organized efficiently), trouble arises on the basis of the historically tumultuous relationship between police and black Americans. After the Civil War, police forces were explicitly deployed to prevent blacks from entering whites’ claimed territories and institutions. Police often turned a blind eye toward—or even actively participated in—mob violence aimed at instilling terror and submission in the black community. As time wore on, the severity and obviousness of the oppression lessened, but the racial angle did not disappear. It merely changed form.

The unique tensions between police and black Americans sit amid a context of implicit bias wherein blacks and crime have become heavily intertwined in public imagery and dialogue.2 Black males, especially, are at the center of discussions about crime and violence. News media feed the public a steady diet of crime stories that disproportionately feature black offenders, and hopeful politicians gunning for office exploit campaign rhetoric with more or less obvious racial overtures as a means of exciting their electorates.3 The stereotype of black males as the poster children for violence in America lingers tenaciously because it seems correct based on crime statistics. As with most stereotypes, a distortion of facts, combined with a few examples of carefully selected confirmatory cases, can make the stereotype appear less like a bias and more like a data-derived, evidence-based conclusion. The black crime stereotype is pernicious precisely because the facts are so easy to manipulate.

At an ecological level, violent crime rates and black populations overlap spatially. Most black Americans reside in metropolitan areas, and many cities’ residential patterns remain racially segregated (sometimes dramatically so). Social and economic isolation—fueled by past and present racial discrimination as well as by employment discrimination and unequal access to educational institutions—has created pockets of impoverished blacks nationwide, particularly in urban areas.4 Crime, especially violent crime, flourishes in these islands of poverty and economic stagnation.5 Disillusionment with society’s primary institutions (e.g., education, job markets) has spurred the rise of an oppositional culture that leads poor black youths growing up in these isolated areas of concentrated disadvantage to reject the values espoused by these institutions and to develop their own codes, norms, and value systems.6 Conflict and violence are forms of currency in this underground economy that prizes self-help and rewards strategic acts of aggression.

Not everyone in these majority-black, impoverished areas commits violence or endorses aggression as an acceptable means of conflict resolution, of course—the majority do not. Those who do not, however, nonetheless bear equal stigma as those who do. The assumption that an individual person’s character or behavior can be predicted on the basis of information about the group to which he or she belongs is an example of a type of faulty logic called the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy occurs when a certain statistic that captures a general trend at the group level is (erroneously) used to infer something about an individual member of that group. Claims that high rates of crime commission among black males justify increased suspicion of them as a group are logically flawed. It is true that black males, especially those in their youth and young adult years, have a higher rate of violent crime commission than any other demographic group; however, most black males do not commit acts of aggression. As with any other demographic group, some young black males engage in crime and violence, but most do not.

Police profiling of young black males occurs when officers assume that the high rates of criminal justice involvement among this group mean that each of them, individually, is potentially dangerous. Research reveals that officers working high-crime beats do not adequately distinguish between those who are involved in crime and those who are not.7 In the context of relations between police officers and young black males, perceptual shorthand is created on the basis of characteristics that officers come to associate with violence, and the “symbolic assailant” is the young black male who does stereotypical things like dressing in baggy clothes and hanging out on street corners.8 Under this heuristic device, a young black male need not do anything overtly suspicious to be considered suspect; instead, his clothing, hairstyle, and mannerisms—mimicking the accoutrements of gang members and drug dealers—are considered sufficient proof of his potential dangerousness. Furthermore, because the danger is always potential rather than certain, the stereotype can never be refuted or falsified. An officer need not revisit his underlying prejudice about black males’ criminal proclivities when he encounters a member of this group who does not assault him and or give him legal grounds for arrest; rather, the officer can rationalize this event in any number of ways (e.g., he handled the situation well and prevented violence, or the suspect is truly guilty but there is not sufficient evidence to prove it). Because the stereotype is fluid, and because dangerousness is framed as potential rather than certain, police officers can maintain their stereotypes even after encountering numerous young black males who are innocent of wrongdoing.

Due to their elevated rates of offending and officers’ failure to adequately distinguish the guilty from the innocent, young minority males are the demographic group most likely to be singled out for stops and frisks. A stop is a brief detention wherein an officer, her suspicions having been aroused by a person’s seemingly aberrant behavior, questions the suspect about who he is, what he is doing, where he is going, and other details designed to obtain information that would either confirm or dispel the officer’s suspicion that the individual is up to mischief. Frisks sometimes, but not always, accompany stops. A frisk is a pat down of the outer layer of a suspect’s clothing; the purpose of the search is to detect contraband such as guns or drugs. These intrusions upon liberty and privacy are minor compared to those entailed in full-blown arrests and searches, but they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: The Racial Double Homicide of Trayvon Martin
• Introduction: Race, Criminal Justice, and the Death of Trayvon Martin
• Part I. Who is in Danger?
• Part II. Where Do You Stand?
• Part III. Which Voices Count?
• Afterword: Reducing Racialized Violence and Deracializing Justice
• About the Contributors
• Index