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Last year, the number of black people facing charges in Washington courts was about 2.5 times their share of the state’s population, largely due to charges for misdemeanors, which are considered less serious crimes.
This is evident from a new online data dashboard published this month by the Washington State Center for Court Research.
The dashboard also shows that the number of Native Americans with charges against them in Washington’s courts last year was about twice their share of the state’s population. For Native women, the gap was even wider, at about three times their share of the population. Latinos are also overrepresented in the justice system, at 1.5 times their share of the population.
“It goes without saying that the United States has a long history of discrimination, particularly against Black and indigenous communities,” said Frank Thomas, an analyst for the Washington State Minority and Justice Commission. “This is a centuries-old, generations-long problem of overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.”
Thomas said that historically, the representation of Black Americans in prisons across the country — going back to 1890 — has been about three times their share of the population.
“There is a lot of consistency — an alarming amount of consistency — in the overrepresentation of Black Americans in the criminal justice system,” Thomas said.
According to 2021 dataIn Washington, six times as many Native people were incarcerated as white people, and 5.7 times as many Black people as white people.
The most common charge contributing to racial disparities, particularly among Latinos, is criminal driving violations. Thomas said people often think of criminal justice in “the context of very serious harm,” but the data suggests that disparities are largely driven by minor legal infractions, such as driving on a suspended license.
This often affects people with a low income, who are more likely to be black, indigenous, or Latino. Thomas gave the example of someone who cannot afford to stop driving to work or take a day off to appear in court, resulting in additional criminal convictions.
Criminal justice advocates in Washington have pushed lawmakers to pass legislation that would prohibit police from pulling over drivers for minor problems such as expired license plates and broken taillights unless there is an “imminent safety risk,” but a bill to do this did not receive a hearing this year.
According to data from the last quarter of 2023, charges against Black people would need to be reduced by 64% to achieve parity in the state. Charges against Indigenous people would need to drop by 55%, and charges against Latinos would need to drop by 37%.
Karl Jones, the justice system researcher who created the dashboard, said he hopes the data will spark conversations about how to reduce disparities across the state’s regions, rather than “taking disparities for granted as the natural order of things.” County-level data from the past decade is available on the dashboardas well as data per court level.
“What creates inequality in one place may not create inequality in another,” Jones said.
