Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) is about a difference in the ratio of non-White kids versus White kids who are caught and punished for delinquent behavior (Figure 8.1). DMC has never been about Black, Latinx and Native American kids being more delinquent or criminalistic than White kids. DMC has always been about a racially skewed focus on the small number of juvenile crimes that are solved. The problem with measuring DMC is that we, as researchers and policymakers, are using bad data. We incorrectly assume that arrest and conviction rates give an objective, proportional picture of criminal activity, despite all evidence to the contrary. Like the recent racial incident in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), too often it is assumed that professionals are above having racial bias, be it purposeful or simply negligent. Given that there is overwhelming evidence of racial inequality—differential treatment of non-Whites—in all areas of society, to even suspect differential involvement we must first assume that race works differently in the justice system than it does in the rest of society. Arrest reports are not “clean” data but are written by the arresting officer, whose own career may be judged, among other factors, based on the reports he or she writes. One does not need to be a “bad actor” to frame oneself in a better light, rather that should be expected as a common bias.

According to 2015 FBI data, 46 percent of the violent crimes and 19 percent of the property crimes reported to police in the United States were cleared (Gramlich, 2017). As noted earlier, just over half of 1 percent of the US population (0.6 percent) is responsible for half of the violent crime in the US (National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College, 2021). We also know that White and non-White kids commit crimes at pretty much the same rate, both by category of crime and by severity, and that police, lawyers, judges and juvenile specialists all tend to see non-White juveniles and their families as more problematic and as much more likely to embrace criminality as acceptable, despite literature showing non-White families to be strikingly similar to White families.