News

New scholarly research has discovered a trend in law enforcement agencies' posts on Facebook that could be compounding the myth of Black criminality nationwide and worsening racial disparities in policing. In this episode of the Duke Law Podcast, three Duke Law criminal law experts examine this research, discuss the implications of this type of police overreporting, and steps law enforcement can take to avoid it.

Guest speakers:

• Ben Grunwald, Professor of Law, co-author of "Police agencies on Facebook overreport on Black suspects"
• James Coleman, the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, and director of the Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility and Wrongful Convictions Clinic at Duke
• (Host) Elana Fogel, Clinical Professor of Law and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Duke

Excerpts:

Prof. Grunwald: "One thing that's really striking about our results is how consistent and uniform they are across crime types. I mean, among the eight serious crimes most reliably tracked, we found high levels of overreporting or overexposure for all of them except auto theft. So that includes violent offenses, like homicide and aggravated assault, and property offenses too, like burglary."

Prof. Coleman: "I think we should be concerned because to the extent that this introduces misinformation into the community, it undermines our attempt to deal with serious social problems. If people think that the problem is that Black people are moving into their community or that Black people are a threat to them physically, then that will be the focus rather than an attempt to try to actually identify the source of the problems."

Prof. Grunwald: "So one good option would be for agencies simply to adopt internal policies that prohibit revealing information, whether it's through their text or through photos, about the race or the ethnicity of suspects on social media. But maybe a more limited approach might be to prohibit officers managing these accounts from revealing that information except in cases where, say, the police are actively searching for someone who's committed a serious crime and may pose an ongoing danger to the public."

Prof. Coleman: "I think there are a number of factors that lead to wrongful convictions-- erroneous eyewitness identifications, false confessions, police and prosecutorial misconduct, jailhouse snitches. But all of these are factors that are influenced by misinformation about race and about Black criminality. And all of these factors are influenced by misinformation about race and about the Black community."

Click here to view a transcript.

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