S.F. justice system’s racial disparities fall, Prop. 47 study says
Significant racial disparities between African Americans and white people caught up in San Francisco’s criminal justice system have narrowed in the three-plus years since statewide Proposition 47 reduced some nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors, according to a study released Thursday.
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, one of the state’s biggest advocates for the proposition, commissioned the grant-funded report.
“I’m pleased we learned that the work we are doing is being done on an equal basis, but I recognize there is still disproportionality,” Gascón said. “Now we have seen the results, we can continue to evolve in what we are doing.”
African Americans have long been overrepresented in the criminal justice system in the United States due to a combination of factors, but the report suggests the disparity between blacks and whites in arrests and case outcomes in San Francisco is narrowing.
Prop. 47 passed in November 2014, and it reduced six nonviolent felonies — including drug possession — to misdemeanors, while raising the threshold for felony theft from $450 to $950.
The result has been a 5 percent drop in police cases in which a suspect booked into jail is African American, according to the report’s authors, UC Berkeley public policy Professor Steven Raphael and University of Pennsylvania criminology and sociology Professor John Macdonald.
Despite making up just 6 percent of the city’s population, African Americans accounted for 43 percent of people booked into jail from 2008 through 2014, the study shows, and after Prop. 47, it fell to 38 percent.
The study also found that black defendants had been given sentences 3.4 months longer than white defendants, on average, before Prop. 47 — a disparity caused by factors that include pretrial detention and criminal history, which disproportionately affect African Americans. However, since Prop. 47, that disparity in sentence lengths between blacks and whites has dropped by half, according to the report.
“If you start from a position where African Americans are more likely to be detained pretrial — and you factor in that being detained pretrial is more likely to lead to a guilty plea — then reducing the likelihood of pretrial detention is going to transfer to the narrowing of racial disparities in case outcomes,” Raphael said.
From its beginning, Prop. 47 has inspired backlash from police chiefs, sheriffs and victims’ advocates around the state. Gascón was one of only three district attorneys in the state — there are 58 total — to back the law.
“This is the beginning of a process for us,” Gascón said. “We now know the things we are doing well. Now we need to develop how we take it to the next step.”
The proposition has reduced the state’s prison and jail populations, but many have argued it has also resulted in rising property crime numbers in some places, including San Francisco. Statewide, however, property crime numbers overall have seen little change since Prop. 47 passed, and some jurisdictions have seen significant decreases in the rates in recent years.