2023 Racial Injustice Report

Racial disparities in Philadelphia’s criminal courts have existed for over a century. As a law-enforcement agency, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office (DAO) has participated in, perpetuated, and more recently, has fought against racial injustice. As a matter of public accountability and transparency, the 2023 Racial Injustice Report report details the history and policies that led to a racially disparate criminal legal system, and puts numbers to the inequalities that exist today.

Examining data on racial disparities in criminal cases was not a straight-forward process, and difficult methodological decisions were made. Data on a defendant’s race is collected by police at arrest—it is unknown whether police ask individuals to self-identify, or if officers write down the race they assume the person to be. Additionally, the racial categories that Philadelphia police use are different than the categories used by the U.S. Census. This makes it difficult to compare representation in the criminal legal system to the City’s wider population, and erases the experiences of many diverse ethnicities.

Furthermore, the criminal legal process is layered and complicated. No two cases go through the same process, and little data is collected about some of the most important decision points. To simplify the analysis, this report looked at representation and outcomes at five major stages of a criminal case.

Individuals are usually introduced into the system after an arrest by a police officer. In Philadelphia, Black people make up around 40% of the population but account for nearly 70% of people stopped by police and 62% of people arrested. This indicates that Black people are stopped and arrested by police at disproportionately higher rates than other racial groups.

Once disparities are introduced to the criminal legal system, they are difficult to eradicate. Longstanding societal inequalities interact with statute and case procedure in ways that cause racial disparities to continue and sometimes worsen.

The following graphs illustrate the overall disproportionalities at play in the system from 2015 to 2022. The first percentage point on the left indicates the group’s share of the overall city population, while the following points correspond to the major stages in a criminal case. Throughout the criminal legal process, Black Philadelphians are over-represented among defendants while white Philadelphians are under-represented, relative to each group’s share of the City’s total population.

Current disparities were not created overnight, and historical research revealed that racial disparities have been present in Philadelphia's courts since at least the early 1900s. The root causes of today's imbalanced justice system lie in the United States' history of legalized slavery and apartheid segregation. Many U.S. social policies and criminal laws were written with the explicit intention to exclude, exploit, and incarcerate Black people and other marginalized communities. Once enacted, laws are slow to change. However, left unaddressed, biased policies will continue to produce the racial disparities they were designed to create.

Despite its reputation as an abolitionist stronghold and a prominent stop on the Underground Railroad, Philadelphia is one of the most residentially segregated cities in the country. While Philadelphia has always been a diverse city, with a large free Black population during slavery and one of the country's oldest Chinatown neighborhoods, it remains highly separated.

Several dramatic population changes have contributed to the racial concentration of communities. In the 1900s, many southern Black families moved to industrialized cities in the northeast, midwest, and mid-Atlantic regions in two distinct waves known as the Great Migrations. As northern cities diversified, policies were created to prevent true integration and maintain social privileges for white people.

In 1937, federal housing authorities reviewed cities housing infrastructure and gave it a grade based on the apparent quality. These grades had large implications for families, driving up home prices and generating wealth in some neighborhoods while stripping value and stability from other neighborhoods. In Philadelphia, redlining had a particular impact. Large swaths of the city were marked in red as “hazardous” or “declining, preventing families who lived there from getting certain loans or making certain investments, financial activities that help to build generational wealth.

As the city grew throughout the 1940s and 1950s, wealthier white Philadelphians were unwilling to tolerate diversification and began self-segregating in the suburbs in a nationally observed movement known as “white flight.” Between 1950 and 1990, nearly one million white people moved out of Philadelphia. The city's overall population shrank, leaving an eroded tax base, more concentrated pockets of poverty, abandoned houses, and areas of unmaintained land.

These demographic changes coincided with economic downturn and a decline in industry and manufacturing. Philadelphia was left with fewer jobs, deflated labor unions, and divestment from the public services that had helped promote safety.  Working-class people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds absorbed the impact from the severe decline of urban manufacturing. , but what resources remained were strategically withheld from Black and other marginalized communities.

Neighborhoods with the most job loss quickly fell into physical disrepair and epidemics of addiction. As poor neighborhoods endured widespread problems related to drug use, federal and state officials responded with a set of punitive laws and policies that went well beyond serious trafficking and drug-related violence. In the height of this “War on Drugs” era, even cases of simple possession were relentlessly pursued. This caused the prison population of Pennsylvania and other states to skyrocket, but the impact on different racial groups was unequal.

Although the laws passed during the War on Drugs appeared to apply to all citizens, their impact fell most heavily on Black and Latinx Americans. While Black, white, and Latinx individuals are shown in national studies to use illegal drugs at similar rates, Black and Latinx people were stereotyped and targeted by law enforcement, media outlets, entertainment culture, and the general public as being drug-involved and violence-involved. Top aides to former-President Nixon openly acknowledged that harsh drug laws and public fear-mongering were explicitly intended to suppress demands for racial justice and economic equality. The War on Drugs, according to the Nixon aide, was a way to “disrupt those communities, […] arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

Today, it is no coincidence that the redlining maps of the 1930s correspond to modern markers of disadvantage.

The accumulation of historical events, institutionalized segregation, and strategic disinvestment have compounded to produce the disparities observed today across nearly every social and legal institution in the country. Many historically redlined neighborhoods, many of them neighborhoods of color, are now grappling with disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, foreclosure, eviction, and mental illness, as well as a lack of education, health care, food access, and internet access. These neighborhoods also see the highest rates of arrests and criminal charges, likely because markers of social disadvantage are significant risk factors for criminal legal involvement.

This report uses data from the 2020 Decennial Census to establish the proportional populations of various racial groups in Philadelphia. The analysis, conducted by the District Attorney’s Transparency & Analytics (DATA) Lab Unit, includes over 290,000 cases charged from 2015-2022 and focuses on five main stages of a criminal case: 1) stop and arrest, 2) charging, 3) bail and pre-trial detention, 4) case outcomes, and 5) sentencing and incarceration. The data in this report uses racial identifications made by police—it is unknown how accurate this data is, or how often arrested people were asked to self-identify. Police record people they arrest as belonging to one of five racial categories (Black, white, Asian, Native American, and unknown) and can add a “Latino” flag to any of these races. Given the limited available measures, this report collapses race and ethnicity into four categories for analysis: Black, white, Latinx, and AAPI.

The safest, healthiest neighborhoods are those with low residential turnover and well-maintained houses, lighting, and green space. The processes that drive crime and system involvement are closely linked to the racially stratified conditions of poverty, poor public health, and social disadvantage, all of which have an impact on the physical environment of a community.  

Residents have long identified poor street lighting and environmental crimes like illegal dumping as factors that make a neighborhood less safe. Simple interventions that provide the resources for people to maintain their homes, revitalize blighted properties, green vacant lots, improve lighting, end illegal dumping, and create community gardens, have been  shown to help reduce gun violence nearby . Furthermore, these interventions improved neighborhood walkability, tree coverage, and communal outdoor space, all of which promote community health. 

Based in part on the literature demonstrating community safety benefits of home maintenance, the Pennsylvania state legislature passed the 2022 Whole Home Repairs Act, providing $125 million in funding to homeowners. This enables residents to make needed repairs, essential upgrades, revitalize their property, and stay in their homes and neighborhoods longer. This act and other policies that prioritize residents and families over landlords and developers are essential elements to preventing violence and crime. 

Restorative justice programs are oriented around healing and repair for victims, the community, and the person who committed the harm. Studies of these programs have shown higher levels of victim satisfaction, lower rates of re-offending, and significant cost savings as compared to traditional prosecution. When hundreds of people were arrested for situation-specific offenses during the 2020 racial justice protests, this office and community partners helped develop a restorative justice program to resolve many of the criminal cases. Nearly two years later, people who completed the program were found to have a lower rearrest rate than comparably situated defendants who were traditionally convicted and sentenced to incarceration.  See the data report here . 

Despite the promising evidence to support restorative justice, the approach has not been widely embraced in Philadelphia or most U.S. jurisdictions. Existing restorative justice efforts tend to be small and targeted to specific types or situations of criminal offending, with narrow defendant eligibility restricting widespread participation. This is due in part to the fact that restorative justice requires a somewhat “slower,” more involved form of justice that is community-centered and highly intentional. These programs also require a high degree of nuance and cooperation among community groups, victims, defendants, prosecutors, defense attorneys, courts, and other actors.  

However, to realize the societal benefits of restorative justice, we must take a broader approach and find ways to implement tenets of the practice at the highest-volume points of the system. Reducing investment in retributive practices will allow more resources to be spent identifying and meeting the needs of victims, defendants, and the community, which should be the foremost goal of the criminal justice process.  

As detailed in this report, the limited quality of available data makes it difficult to understand and analyze racial disparities in the system. Many criminal legal agencies record data on software and hardware systems that do not “talk” to one another, preventing the sharing of data throughout the entire process of a criminal case. When data is not properly collected or systematically shared, it is more challenging to implement comprehensive data-driven reform. While Philadelphia has relatively robust and integrated data systems among its criminal justice partners (as compared to other U.S. jurisdictions), much further effort is needed to address major gaps and problems.  

Data accuracy is crucial for informing policy decisions and implementing effective interventions, particularly in relation to reducing racial disparities. Key demographic variables, if not collected thoughtfully and intentionally, can mask or obscure the experiences of entire groups of people. For this reason, data scientists and researchers must partner closely with communities to fully understand what data signifies, what context is lacking, and what future data systems must be designed to adequately capture the diversity of identities and experiences.

This report aims to shed light on the ways that macro-level historical developments and policies can influence individual defendants and cases on the micro-level. One of the most powerful steps an agency can take towards racial justice is to acknowledge and analyze the ways that a legacy of structural and societal racism is influencing their work. Only after this acknowledgment can steps be taken to address the harms. 

State-level actions can have a profound benefit to this effect. The California Racial Justice Act of 2020 allows a person convicted of a crime to challenge racial bias in their case using a greater variety of evidence than was previously possible. Under the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case McClesky v. Kemp, defendants could not bring an appeal alleging racial bias in their case using evidence of broad racial disproportionalities and disparities in the jurisdiction under which they were convicted. Instead, defendants had to prove intentional racial discrimination by an actor or set of actors involved in their case. Under the new California law, defendants in that state can use statistical disparities in charging, convictions, and sentencing to challenge the terms of their conviction. This further underscores the need for justice agencies to provide the public with transparent data and analytical resources, so that the information may be used to advocate for racial justice at a variety of levels. 

The criminal legal system, at every stage of the system, is supposed to increase public safety. To accomplish this, law enforcement actors use a variety of statutory guidelines and predictive algorithms to assess the “risk” associated with a person who has been arrested. As with other elements of the legal system, the actuarial instruments and sentencing matrices created to assess a defendant’s risk to society are designed with economic, racial, and cultural bias baked into them.

A person’s prior criminal record is one of the most influential pieces of information used to assess their risk to the community and is used at every stage of a criminal case, from bail to parole. However, even something as seemingly neutral and official as a criminal record can be tinged with bias. A person may have lived in a community that was over-policed and therefore was arrested more often, may have been unjustly convicted, or may have falsely pled guilty in order to move on from the case. A prior record can prevent a person from being released from jail pre-trial, can exclude them from diversion eligibility, or can trigger sentencing enhancements such as longer incarceration. 

The state of Pennsylvania remains an outlier in assigning high rates of cash bail across jurisdictions, particularly for Black and Latinx Pennsylvanians. The ability to pay monetary bail does not determine whether someone is a risk to commit further crimes. This practice automatically penalizes poor people, who are disproportionately Black, and causes them to be imprisoned in racially disparate ways. Major jurisdictions that have eliminated cash bail have seen substantial social and financial benefits, but meaningful action must be taken at the state level to end the deeply unjust practice. 

This data-driven report on the racial disparities in Philadelphia’s legal system is long overdue. While there is some emerging evidence of progress, it is clear that far more work is required to eliminate racial disparities in the criminal legal system. These efforts will require multi-agency mobilization, ongoing evaluation, and collective action in partnership with local community groups. Law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders, and the judiciary must share data and solutions with the united goal of ending entrenched disparities and addressing historical and current social factors that create injustice. Data should be made publicly available and easy to understand to ensure that the community is well informed of the ongoing influence that the legal system has on their welfare. This would also guarantee Philadelphians whose lives have been negatively impacted by the legal system the opportunity to provide their invaluable input. Through sustained attention to racial justice and consistent efforts to further equality, we can begin to repair a long history of discrimination and bias within Philadelphia’s criminal legal system.