Racism and the enforcement of institutional racist policies by the police in Oakland was an accepted part of life to the blacks who lived there. While blacks no longer were legally excluded from living in any area of the city, they were often looked at with suspicion by the police when they entered predominately white middle or upper class communities. At night in particular, a black driving in such an area was often stopped by a white policeman. Usually the pretext would be that the man's car fit the description of a reported stolen vehicle, or the car had some defect such as no light over the rear license plate. The actual purpose however, was to allow the officer to determine why a black person was in that particular neighborhood at that time of night." 150-151.
"The white officer, who was suspicious in such circumstances, often viewed himself as "unprejudiced. In fact, he may have been merely reflecting institutional subordination to the policies of his department which stressed that its officers should be observant and suspicious. They justified the degree of suspicion directed against blacks by arresting them at a rate disproportionate to their 30.2 percent of the city's total population. James Q. Wilson noted that in the year 1965 the arrest rate in Oakland for blacks on larceny-related charges was 1,818.9 per 100,000 population, while the arrest rate for whites for the same offense was 494.9 per 100,00 population . It is these statistics that show the degree to which racism is institutionalized throughout the criminal justice system. A study conducted by Morris A Forslund* documented that not only were blacks arrested at a higher percentage rate than whites, but that they also were charged with a greater number of separate offenses per arrest, found guilty of a higher percentage of offenses per arrest, and sentenced to correctional institutions more frequently than whites." 153-154.
