Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies

"This report examines how racial perceptions of crime are a key cause of the severity of punishment in the United States. Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies, authored by Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Ph.D., research analyst at The Sentencing Project, synthesizes two decades of research revealing that white Americans’ strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos are related to their support for punitive policies that disproportionately impact people of color.

Coming on the heels of the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri, the report demonstrates that the consequences of white Americans’ strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos extend far beyond policing."

Read the full report

Police ‘whitewashing’ crime stats, study says

The majority of Canadian police forces are “whitewashing” crime statistics by refusing to provide information about the race of people they come into contact with, says a new report by two Ontario criminologists.

Only a minority of police agencies — 20 per cent — have policies restricting them from releasing the data, but nearly 60 per cent suppress it anyway, the report says.

The findings are to be published Wednesday in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society.

Withholding the information makes police less accountable and makes it more difficult for researchers to study how race may influence policing, said Paul Millar, a Nippissing University criminal justice professor, who conducted the study with Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto Centre for Criminology.

Read on...

Akwasi, co-author of this report is a Centre doctoral candidate. Here is a link to a CBC radio interview with Akwasi:
http://www.cbc.ca/metromorning/episodes/2012/02/01/whitewashing/

And Akwasi will be on Global News tonight at 6:30. Tom