For more than a decade, state and federal government agen- cies have issued reports and held meetings about the dispro- portionate number of minorities in jails and prisons. But by the time people land in jail, they're often too far gone for help. That's a heartbreaking notion, especially when you're talking about teenage children. When Congress passed the Juvenile Justice and Delin- quency Prevention Act of 2002 it intended to address the ar- rest imbalance for minority- group juveniles by reducing the number of children who get in trouble with the law.
For that reason, I decided to look at the racial composition of the children arrested in Colum- bia by analyzing the police department's arrest data, us- ing the lessons I learned at a recent NICAR Boot Camp. I found the proportion of minor- ity children had swelled over eight years. In 1995, 60 percent of all juve- nile arrests in the city involved white children. By 2003, 60 percent of all ju- venile arrests involved black children, who make up 18 percent of all kids in the city.
My story, "The Color of Justice," didn't start out as an examination of the ra- cial composition of juvenile arrests. I had just been assigned to cover city hall when the city council member who represents central Columbia was con- sidering whether to push for a curfew law. One of the opponents said the law would be enforced primarily in the cen- tral city, where the city's black popula- tion is concentrated, and act as a sort of "Jim Crow law." From my previous reporting experi- ence, I knew many police departments use computers to map where crimes and arrests occur.
Sure enough, Co- lumbia possessed the same technol- ogy. I asked the police to map the gen- eral locations of curfew-hour arrests. It turned out the curfew opponent was right on the mark - most curfew-hour arrests occurred in the central city. I negotiated for as many fields as I could get. But when I showed the map to my edi- tor, he wasn't convinced there was a story yet. That's when my lessons of the NICAR boot camp kicked in.
I knew that I needed to talk to the keeper of the database at the police department to determine what other information was available. I negotiated for as many fields as I could get. Because juvenile records are protected, I had little leverage. What I received from the city on CD- ROM was messy. I could have sworn that I requested the data in delimited text format, but when I opened the file, I found that the data ran together and had inconsistent breaks.
Appropriately, the city's com- puter technician labeled the CD "Datadump." The IRE and NICAR Data Library wrote a Perl program that cleaned the file for the most part, though there were still some problems. Later when I sought additional data, the city's computer tech produced the data in an Excel spreadsheet, which he could have done from the start. Many fields in the more complete data set were inconsistently filled, such as the officer, whether a weapon had been involved and time of the arrest.
However, I found that the data in- cluded the following columns of infor- mation: uniform crime reporting code, age, year, sex and race. That's what I stayed with. I was dealing with about 15,000 records, so it was easy for me to im- port the data from Excel to Access for querying. I used Access to count the number of arrests by race and year; soon I had totals for 1995 through 2003. I then moved those numbers to an Excel spreadsheet, where I created a line graph that showed a dramatic shift toward more black arrests than white arrests.
Now all I had to do was get the police department to explain why. I showed my analysis and the curfew- hour arrest map to the police chief and his captain and they had no ex- planation. "You can make numbers do anything you want them to," the captain replied. My editor prompted me to find other cities and groups that have addressed the racial imbalance in arrests and pris- ons and I eventually learned about how Portland, Ore., Santa Cruz, Calif., and Seattle had reduced juvenile arrests and incarcerations.
A local community outreach center put me in touch with a family that had run-ins with the police and probation department. One of the children ended up serving as a focal point for my story. After the story was published, the dis- proportionate minority arrests emerged as an issue in the mayoral election. Here are some lessons I learned re- porting the story: Nearly 70 percent of all police depart- ments track and report their arrests by race to the federal government.
It's still uncertain whether all departments will be required to report the racial composition of their arrests, as the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act evolves. However, because courts are funded by a separate pool of money than police agencies, police don't have the same in- centive to report arrest statistics as court offices do with inmates. Because police organizations are hi- erarchical, you'll have to start some- where at the top and find your way to the department's database guru.
If you ask the police whether they keep computerized records for the ar- rest of each child, and then ask to see a record layout (which shows the fields in the database, such as name, date of birth, race, location of arrest and charge), the police will often point you in the direction of the person who keeps the database. Be willing to negotiate for fields you want after you see which are available.
Because juveniles' identities are highly protected under the law, you will have little leverage for negotiating. Ask for as many years of data as possible so you can observe trends. I had eight years of data and was able to see the shift toward the arrests of black children. Consider the mapping possibilities. During my reporting, I learned that the police department uses mapping to mark locations of crimes and target patrols.
While police may not divulge the specific locations of arrests, they might reveal the general block group or area of arrest. I simply asked police to map juvenile arrests by block group. When assembling juvenile justice data, check out the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Web site at www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org. The site has national statistics on juvenile arrests, which can be compared on a county- by-county basis.
You can read "The Color of Justice" on the Web at http://archive. columbiatribune.com/2004/Feb/ 20040208Feat051.asp. Contact Dave Moore by e-mail at dmoore@tribmail.com.