M (2005) Explaining the great racial divide: Perceptions of fairness in the U.S. criminal justice system

We examine the huge racial divide in citizens ’ general beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system, focusing on the political consequences of these beliefs for shaping diverging interpretations of police behavior. Predictably, most blacks believe the system to be unfair and most whites believe the opposite. More importantly, these beliefs influence the interpretation of events quite differently. African Americans who view the system as unfair are much more suspicious of the police in con-frontations with black civilians. Fairness for whites, however, has fewer racial connotations; they naively interpret the confrontations disregarding civilian race. Still, whites holding antiblack stereo-types are much more sympathetic to the police in their confrontations with black civilians. On April 29, 1992, a mainly white jury in Simi Valley, CA voted to acquit four white police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King, an African Amer-ican. Almost immediately, massive rioting erupted in nearby Los Angeles; one of the casualties was Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was pulled from his vehicle and severely beaten. On October 18, a mostly African-American jury acquitted the two blacks accused of beating Denny on virtually all counts. Racial divisions over this verdict were stark: a Los Angeles Times poll found whites almost twice as likely to disagree with the verdict as blacks (67 to 38%), with whites more than twice as likely to express “anger ” over the outcome (48 to 19%). A magnified division reemerged several years later during the contentious trial of O. J. Simpson and continues today over a host of criminal justice issues and events (Roberts and Stalans 1997), many of which1 are nationally scrutinized