David A Harris

Listen to "David Harris Releases The Book A City Divided" on Spreaker. Professor of Law David A. Harris has been writing, teaching and conducting research about the law and police at the intersection of race and criminal justice for thirty years. He holds the Sally Ann Semenko Chair at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and conducts seminars and training for lawyers, judges, police officers and community activists across the U.S. He works frequently with the national media as a legal analyst on criminal justice and police issues, and hosts the Criminal Injustice podcast. A City Divided is his fourth book about criminal justice and police. Harris has authored: Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science (2012), Good Cops: The Case for Preventive Policing (2005), and Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work (2002). The tragic death of a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, out for a run at the hands of two white men (one a former police officer) in Georgia, with no arrests for two months. The two white men see a black man running, and assume he must be a criminal, per the research discussed in the book. No arrests for two months, until a viral video and outside media begin to expose this? Only race explains this. The state's Stand Your Ground and "citizen's arrest" laws make for greater violence, not less, and allow privileged people to put themselves in positions where law will support their use of deadly force. The law, and the culture of law enforcement, of Glynn County, GA, are emblematic of U.S. law enforcement's "protect each other at all costs" culture. https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-georgia.html OTHER TOPICS TO DISCUSS: **With social distancing rules in effect, and many areas still under heavy restrictions, racially disparate enforcement of social distancing guidelines, in NYC and across the country. Crowds of African Americans warrant summonses and even arrests; crowds of whites do not get this response from the police. A strong reflection of what we saw before the pandemic: for example, under stop and frisk in NY and elsewhere, we saw a police focus on black and brown people, even when whites behaved the same way at the same rates or even at higher rates. Even as black and brown people are more heavily policed, white people (in small numbers, but in deliberate and illegal fashion) appear in public places like state capitols, violating social distancing rules, heavily armed, screaming in police officers' faces, calling public health officials and governors Nazis. No real enforcement actions follow.