Scholarly assessments of the black experience in American criminal justice tend to center on numerical disparities in arrests, sentencing, and incarceration. With few exceptions, little to no attention is devoted to the many ways in which the substantive elements of the average black law enforcement experience systematically diverge from that of whites. The fact that blacks encounter the very worst treatment the system has to offer is most often the stuff of newspaper headlines. High-profile incidents such as those involving Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, the Scott sisters, Professor Henry Louis Gates, and Oscar Grant are occasions on which civil rights leaders, organizations, and demonstrators sound the alarm to expose what they see as a system rife with callousness and low regard for blacks and their civil liberties. The infamous ordeals of the Rodney Kings and Oscar Grants of the world, in their view, are symptomatic of a much deeper and more widespread pathology – one that lurks behind the much talked about statistical overrepresentation. The rare emergence of such high-profile incidents, however, makes it difficult to assail the notion they are nothing more than isolated incidents or, at best, the kind that occur only in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and other hotbeds of policing controversy. The preoccupation with racial disparities thus continues to dominate the already limited discourse on experiential differences in the criminal process.