Racial Discrimination in Policing: Dysfunction in the Law Enforcement System or a Social Institution?

Abstract

The different ways law enforcement officials treat members of the ethnic majority as opposed to ethnic minorities has caused heated debate. Some researchers attribute this to the racism of individual police officers or the racist culture of the police. Opponents accuse them of bias and lack of methodological rigor, rightly noting that the mere presence of statistical
imbalances or racist conversations in the 'police locker rooms' is not enough for such conclusions. Another subject of controversy is the issue of institutionalizing these differences. The assumption that they are the result of a deliberate public policy suffers from a lack of empirical data that could confirm this. As a result, despite more than a fifty-year period of research
on ethnically motivated control, these issues remain unresolved. A characteristic feature of the study of racial discrimination in policing is the fact that it was traditionally conducted as part of a broader study of criminal justice, as a result of which, in most cases, such control was considered to be a police problem or related to dysfunction in law enforcement agencies
in general. The possibility of participating in the implementation of ethnically motivated control of state and non-governmental organizations not participating in law enforcement, as a rule, was not even considered. The empirical base of such studies comes from observations, statistics and opinion polls. At the same time, documentary sources in the vast majority of cases remained outside the scope of researchers. The article is aimed at demonstrating the possibilities offered by the analysis of documents in the study of racial discrimination in policing, correcting some common ideas about this phenomenon, as well as outlining ways to study it more comprehensively.