Racial divide

But as we confront what has happened, and is still happening, in Ferguson, that sense of progress isn´t how America looks if you are black. President Obama, ever cautious dealing with racial issues, acknowledged a problem that is not unique to St. Louis during a White House meeting on Monday, noting a “simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.”

It´s in those communities that the “justice” system is perceived as rigged, and statistics suggest that it is.

Consider arrests in the Lansing area.

The Lansing Police Department´s 2012 arrest rate per 1,000 residents was 100.2 for blacks compared with 26.5 for whites, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data submitted by police departments to the FBI. This is in a city that according to census data is about 24 percent black.

It´s even more disproportionate in East Lansing, where there police arrest rate per 1,000 residents is 275.2 for blacks and just 60.4 for whites. Academic trappings aside, East Lansing is very much a law-and-order community. The black/ white arrest ratio is even more skewed in Meridian Township: 169 to 19. In Detroit, one of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation, the ratio is 52.2 black/24.7 white.

Yet, these sorts of statistics don´t necessarily indicate racial policing.

“You have to look beyond the bare numbers at the type of offenses people are arrested for,” said 54-A District Court Judge Hugh B. Clarke Jr. The statistics include serious offenses like murder or robbery, he explained, but there are many arrests for minor crimes like outstanding warrants, unpaid fines and possession of small amounts of marijuana that can skew the reporting. He said it´s frustrating making sense of the numbers.

The Lansing Police Department uses an independent agency to analyze traffic stops. They are video- and audio-recorded along with race, time date, gender and other pertinent statistics, Police Chief Michael Yankowski said. “For the past 13 years, independent researchers have concluded that there is ´no evidence of problematic behavior of LPD — notably no evidence of racial profiling emerging from data,´” he explained. Lansing´s police force is 20.7 percent minority in a community Yankowski described as 40 percent minority. The department is planning to add seven officers, five of whom are minority.

That´s arrests; now sentencing.

In Michigan, if your incarcerated, you are almost certainly black. The Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization, reports in this state there are 5.5 black prisoners for every white prisoner. This is vastly disproportionate to Michigan´s population, which is about 15 percent African American.

Why the disparity?

“I don´t know that I have an answer,” said Clarke, who is African American. “But when you look at the statistics, it raises a red flag.”

It´s a raised red flag and more if you are on the receiving end of a system that year-in and year-out that seems to target your family, friends and neighborhood, how can you not suspect bias in law enforcement or the justice system.

“For black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail,” the Sentencing Project reports. It finds that 1-in-3 black men will be imprisoned at some time in their lifetime. For white men, it is 1-in 17.

Life doesn´t get better after incarceration. Reentry programs are sketchy at best, and a felony conviction makes it difficult if not impossible to find a meaningful job. What would you do? Really.

How would earn enough money each week to keep your family together? The justice problem is exacerbated by poverty, which has reached unacceptable levels in black communities. While the economic collapse of the Great Recession touched many groups (not the wealthy, of course), most have begun to recover.

But black communities are struggling. Just how bad things are is illustrated by statistics from the Kids Count Data Center, which finds in 2011 that 269,000, or 73 percent, of all black children in Michigan are 200 percent under the poverty level. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 34 percent of blacks (451,400) live in poverty compared with 11 percent of whites. Michigan is tied in 8th place with Louisiana. The national average is 24 percent black/10 percent white.

Pick a problem: health, education, family structure, transportation. Poverty is a grinding existence with crime, policing, prison as the backdrop. The rioting the accompanied the shooting of Michael Brown and the grand jury´s decision not to bring an indictment against police officer Darren Wilson is self-destructive and criminal. And longstanding.

“The problem is nobody wants to really entertain a discussion of race relations,” Clarke said. “It is the most uncomfortable subject, and until we really have a conversation, these things are going to continue.”

President Obama said it too, and on Monday called for a “sustained conversation in which, in each region of the country, people are talking about this honestly.”