False Assumptions
As the courtroom begins to fill up, an officer makes his rounds, asking all those present for their name. He then proceeds to the cardboard box of manilla folders and pulls out the cases of the present defendants. This process allows for the court to be efficient and for the defendants to be sent on their way more quickly. One individual, however, was left waiting. A well-dressed, middle-aged, ethnically Chinese man sat patiently in the second row of the court for over an hour before he was finally approached by the officer.
“What are you here for?”
“Court.”
“Do you have a criminal case?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, man. I assumed you were here for a building code violation. I would have called your case a lot earlier. I’m sorry you have been waiting so long. We will get you out of here as soon as possible. What’s your name?”
Every Tuesday, the court processes the building code violation docket following the criminal docket. However, people with such violations usually arrive later in the morning. This individual arrived punctually at 9 am.
The officer smiled and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. He then proceeded to pull the file and call the defendant’s name minutes later. He was being represented by the public defender, but still needed to qualify for these services going forward.
It seems clear that the court officer assumed that the man was not attending criminal court because he was ethnically Chinese rather than Black or Latinx, the usual pool of defendants in Poughkeepsie’s city court. The defendant’s charges, however, were just as serious, if not more so, than most of the other defendants in the courtroom that day: aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle while intoxicated.
This seemingly innocuous example of bias toward Asian Americans as model minorities is the flip side of the far more pernicious racial and ethnic biases operating in the criminal legal system in this country. In her compelling book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander discusses the impact of police officers’ inherent biases, which have led to disproportionate arrest rates for members of Black and Latinx communities. For example, throughout the War on Drugs, law enforcement was granted “extraordinary discretion” regarding “...whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses…” which ensured that “...conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes…” were given “free rein” (103). As a result, courts like Poughkeepsie are overrepresented by Black and Latinx defendants—and hence the reason for this court officer’s “innocent” mistake.
The right time to correct these biases, of course, is long before individuals are summoned to court—when police are patrolling neighborhoods, when residents decide to call the police, when public money is being spent for schools and social services. Once individuals are targeted and arrested, it is often impossible for them to escape the “cruel hand” of the criminal legal system and its life-long impacts.a