Adachi: The over-policing of black women in SF
In the wake of the San Francisco Police Department’s racist text messages scandal, Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s elected public defender, discusses a recent study by CJCJ’s Mike Males showing black women in San Francisco face arrest rates 13 times higher than women of other races.
“Police Chief Greg Suhr, while rightly acknowledging the racial discrimination that marred police enforcement in the past, is wrong when he states socioeconomic issues alone are responsible for today’s disproportionate number of African Americans behind bars. And socioeconomic issues do not explain why, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco’s arrest rate of black women is four times higher than anywhere else in California. Poverty alone cannot reconcile the fact that black teenage girls in San Francisco have arrest rates 50 times higher than their counterparts in other counties.” Read the report »