Young Hispanics and blacks who are arrested in Santa Clara County are booked into juvenile hall at significantly higher rates than whites or Asians. That’s the bad news drawn from an analysis of arrest and booking data over a four-year period collected from every police agency in the county.
Here’s the good news: The cases that account for the disparity represent less than 1 percent of 5,681 bookings.
One percent is not bad, said Pat Dwyer, former police chief of Palo Alto, but you wouldn’t want to be in that 1 percent.
Between 2003 and 2006, there were 45,446 juvenile arrests in the county; 12.5 percent resulted in bookings. Hispanic youth accounted for 52 percent of the arrests but 59 percent of those booked. Conversely, white youth made up 24 percent of arrests but only 17 percent of those booked. Blacks and Asians each represented 10 percent of arrests; but black youth made up 13 percent of the bookings, compared to 8 percent for Asians.
The study, conducted at the behest of county leaders, analyzed bookings and arrests in 22 crime
“These disparities clearly affect Hispanics negatively more than any other group,” said Dwyer, who was contracted to conduct the study for the county. “If there’s bias in the system,” he said, “we need to ferret it out and fix it.”
However, a Mercury News analysis of the same data with a different methodology indicates that blacks, not Hispanics, had the highest booking rate – 16.4 percent, compared to 14.1 percent for Hispanics and 9 percent for whites.
The county’s Juvenile Detention Reform Steering Committee received the report this week.
The fact that minorities are confined at a higher rate is really not new to anyone involved in the criminal justice system.
“We’ve seen the disparities, unfortunately, throughout the system,” said Marc Buller, assistant district attorney. “It’s not surprising that the disparities continue in arrests and bookings.”
The task now is to “look beyond the numbers and see what are the reasons,” Buller said, calling the study a “launching point.”
County Executive Pete Kutras, who applauded the cooperation of police agencies needed to gather the data, offered this analogy:
“If I’m standing there with my friend, and we’re both arrested, and my friend is a minority and my friend is detained and I get home with a warning, that shouldn’t be happening.”
Some of the figures are misleading because the number of crimes involved is small, skewing the percentages. For example, Asians represented 9 percent of arrests for arson, but 16 percent of the bookings for that crime. But consider the raw numbers: Out of 212 arson arrests in the four-year period, only 19 were Asian, and six of them were booked.
On the other hand, there were 2,263 burglary arrests – and large disparities between minorities and whites in booking rates. Of the number of white youths arrested, 15.4 percent were booked, compared to 21 percent for Hispanics and 23.7 percent for blacks.
With the arrest and booking data in hand, the county has asked various committees to do more work: What happens after the booking? What happens at the district attorney’s office in terms of charges? What happens at the judicial level, when the judge issues a sentence? Among the causal factors to be considered are: bias in the system; socioeconomic issues; the type of crime; and the history of the arrested youth.
Contact Truong Phuoc Kha`nh at tkhanh@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2729.
