"Where you going?" the cops asked the teenager lugging his schoolbooks along Vermont Avenue one afternoon last week. "What are you doing?"
They pointed to his UC Berkeley cap and clothes, all blue--a color often favored by local gang members. And they said:
"You look suspicious."
They let him go with a warning, but later that day Wylie Jason Tidwell III, 17, became livid while telling the story to friends.
"Suspicious? Me? Why, because I'm black?" asked the tall Washington Prep High School senior, soon to be a San Francisco State University freshman.
His friends, college-bound black and Latino youths who also live in South-Central Los Angeles, listened and nodded. Said one: "The experience is all the same here. We've all been through that and worse."
New studies show that these teenagers are not alone.
Pulling together the most comprehensive data yet on race and crime in America, two recent reports show that, at every stage of the nation's system of crime and punishment--from arrest through plea bargaining to sentencing--black and brown Americans get tougher treatment than whites.
And the studies show that criminal justice trends in California closely mirror national conditions.
Such patterns, the studies say, have led to worsening racial disparities in criminal justice. And they have contributed to deep-rooted hopelessness in many communities of color.
The studies also highlight new, disheartening trends, ones Tidwell and his friends found unsurprising:
* Among first-time offenders charged with the same crime, young minority group members are six times as likely to be locked up as are young whites.
* Whites and blacks use drugs at the same rate, yet nearly two-thirds of those convicted of drug offenses are black.
* Between 1985 and 1995, the rate of Latino incarceration nationwide more than tripled. Latinos are the fastest-growing group of imprisoned Americans.
* Young African Americans in California are imprisoned in state facilities at the third-highest rate in the nation. Though just 7% of Californians are black, 38% of the youths sent to adult prisons in 1996 were black.
"Crime has come to be defined as an issue of people of color, and the long-term consequences are going to be grave," said Dan Macallair, vice president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a 15-year-old national group aimed at reducing society's use of prisons to solve social problems.
