Situation Report

WHITES often assume that civil rights acts and court decisions have made law the black man's redeemer. In practice, many blacks see the law as something different: a white weapon that white policemen, white judges and white juries use against black people. Indeed, blacks are clearly underrepresented in law enforcement and overrepresented in crime and punishment. Among the facts:

LAW ENFORCEMENT. Blacks make up 38% of the population in Atlanta, 27% in Chicago, 39% in Detroit, 40% in Newark and 63% in Washington, D.C. By contrast, the proportion of black policemen in those cities is 10%, 17%, 5%, 10% and 21% respectively. Of the nation's 300.000 lawyers, only 3,000 are black--one of the smallest black ratios of any U.S. profession. Of the Government's 93 U.S. Attorneys, none is black; the most recent (Cecil Poole of San Francisco) has just been replaced by a white. Thurgood Marshall sits on the Supreme Court, but of 459 federal judges, only 22 are black. Among the country's 12,000 state and city judges, only 178 are black. As for prison administration, California is a good example: 28.6% of the state's inmates are black, but all 13 prison wardens are white. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Blacks are arrested between three and four times more often than whites, partly because police stop and search blacks far more frequently than they do whites. This is only partly rooted in race prejudice: blacks probably commit more violent crime than whites--partly because the black population has a far higher ratio of the youths who mainly commit such crimes. Most of the victims of black crime are black. Example: black women are 18 times more likely to be raped than white women, and usually by black assailants.

Once caught, black suspects are more likely than whites to be jailed rather than bailed, more likely to be convicted than acquitted, and more likely to receive stiff sentences. Of the 479 condemned men now on death row in U.S. prisons, more than half are black. According to many experts, one factor in this disproportion is poverty: few black defendants can afford skilled lawyers.

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