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Stop Human Rights Abuses
Decades of Disparity
March 2, 2009

Methodology

The figures, tables, and charts presented in this report are based primarily on drug arrest data[4] Human Rights Watch obtained directly from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, the most complete nationwide arrest and crime database available.[5] While UCR drug arrest data are available on the internet for each year beginning with 1995,[6] we obtained from the UCR Program data for the years 1980-2006, which permits us to show the trends in drug arrests from a period prior to the full onset of the war on drugs in the mid-1980s to the present. The UCR data Human Rights Watch obtained includes annual figures for total arrests as well as the distribution of adult drug arrests by race[7] and type of drug offense (sales/manufacturing or possession). The data for 2007 presented in this report are from the FBI's publication, "Crime in the United States, 2007," which is also based on UCR data.[8] Because national arrest data mask considerable variations among the individual states, Human Rights Watch also obtained from the UCR Program state-by-state data for 2006 (the most recent year for which such data were available at the time of the request) that provide for each state the number of adult drug arrests by race, broken down by type of offense.[9] Using the data obtained from the UCR Program and population estimates from the US Census Bureau, Human Rights Watch was able to compute national rates of arrest by race proportional to population and therefore the ratios of black to white drug arrests for the years 1980-2007.

As detailed below, the numbers show that stark racial disparities in drug arrest rates are an enduring feature of the US war on drugs.

[4] Drug arrests are arrests for the unlawful cultivation, manufacture, distribution, sale, purchase, use, possession, transportation or importation of any controlled drug or narcotic substance. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), "Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook," 2004, p. 142, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/handbook/ucrhandbook04.pdf (accessed February 11, 2009). Arrest figures reflect each separate instance in which a person is arrested, cited, or summoned for an offense, rather than the number of individuals arrested.

[5] The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program receives, compiles and publishes crime and arrest data obtained from more than 17,000 voluntarily participating local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. In 2007, law enforcement agencies active in the UCR Program represented more than 285 million United States inhabitants-94.6 percent of the total population. FBI, "Crime in the United States, 2007: About the UCR Program," September 2008, ; FBI, "Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook." While the UCR Program data are the most comprehensive available, they do not capture all arrests in the United States each year. The number of participating agencies varies somewhat annually, and some agencies do not provide 12 months worth of arrest data. See footnote 9 for further description of specific limitations on the 2006 data for certain states. It is more than likely that limitations similar to those described in footnote 9 are reflected in the data for other years as well. Data from Florida are not included in the UCR Program data provided to us because Florida does not provide the UCR Program with information on arrests that identify, for each arrest, the age and race of the personarrested, the nature of the drug offense and the drug involved.

[6] UCR Program drug arrest data are included in the annual FBI publication, "Crime in the United States." See the FBI's website for the UCR Program, at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm (accessed February 11, 2009). "Crime in the United States" does not include a breakdown for drug arrests by race according to the nature of offense (sales/manufacturing versus possession).

[7] The UCR Program gathers information on the race of arrestees, using four racial categories (white, black, American Indian or Alaskan Native, and Asian or Pacific Islander). It does not gather data on the ethnicity or national origin of arrestees, such as whether they are Hispanic. See information on racial designations in FBI, "Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook," p. 97. Hispanics/Latinos are included in the figures provided for white and black drug arrestees in this report, but their number or percentage cannot be determined.

[8] FBI, "Crime in the United States, 2007," September 2008, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/arrests/index.html (accessed February 11, 2009). "Crime in the United States" is available online for each year beginning in 1995. The online drug arrest data do not include a breakdown of kind of offense or narcotic involved.

[9] The state by state data provided for 2006 contain certain limitations which are reflected in the tables and figures presented in this report. Data for the District of Columbia for 2006 are not included in our charts and tables because the UCR Program received information on only a tiny fraction of DC drug arrests that year. The figures for arrests in Illinois in 2006 reflect arrests in Chicago and Rockford only; other law enforcement agencies did not provide arrest data to the UCR Program that year. The Illinois drug arrest data provided to us also did not include a breakdown by nature of offense. In addition, we discovered that the total number of drug arrests reported by the UCR Program for Colorado, Connecticut, and Idaho in 2006 was less than the combined number of possession and sales arrests reported for each of those states (in all other states, the total number of drug arrests equaled thecombined number of possession and sales arrests). We combined possession and sales offenses for the arrest totals for those three states in Tables 3 and 4 and in Chart 2. Colorado reported 3,000 white drug arrests in 2006 to the UCR Program that were not classified by the nature of the offense (possession or sales). The percentages reflected in Table 6 were calculated on the basis of the 13,638 white arrests for which the nature of the offense was reported.