Black, Native people face higher rates of charges in Washington courts

The number of Black people with charges filed against them in Washington’s courts last year was about 2.5 times greater than their share of the state’s population – largely due to misdemeanor charges, which are considered less serious crimes.

That’s according to a new online data dashboard released this month by the Washington State Center for Court Research.

The dashboard also shows that the number of Native Americans with charges filed against them in Washington’s courts last year was about two times greater than their share of the state’s population. For Native women, the disparity was even larger, at around 3 times their share of the population. Latino people, too, are overrepresented in the legal system, at 1.5 times their share of the population.

“It goes without saying that the United States has a long history of discrimination particularly to the Black and Indigenous communities,” said Frank Thomas, an analyst for the Washington State Minority and Justice Commission. “This is an ages-long, generations-long issue of overrepresentation in the criminal legal system.”

Thomas said that historically, the representation of Black Americans in prisons nationwide – going as far back as 1890 – has been around three times their share of the population.

“There’s a lot of consistency – an alarming amount of consistency – of overrepresentation of Black Americans in the criminal legal system,” Thomas said.

According to 2021 data, Washington incarcerated Indigenous people at more than six times the rate of white people and Black people at 5.7 times the rate of white people.

The most common charge contributing to racial disparities, particularly for Latino people, is criminal traffic violations. Thomas said people often think of criminal justice in “the context of very serious harm,” but the data suggests disparities are largely driven by minor legal violations, like driving with a suspended license.

That often affects low-income people, who are more likely to be Black, Native or Latino. Thomas gave the example of someone who can’t afford to stop driving their vehicle to work or take a day off to appear for a court date, resulting in additional criminal convictions.

Criminal justice advocates in Washington have pushed lawmakers to pass legislation preventing police from stopping drivers over minor issues like expired tabs and broken tail lights unless there is an “immediate safety risk,” but a bill to do so failed to receive a hearing this year.

Charges against Black individuals would have to be reduced by 64% to achieve parity across the state, according to data from the last quarter of 2023. Charges against Native people would need to fall by 55% and charges against Latino people by 37%.

Karl Jones, the court system’s researcher who created the dashboard, said he hopes the data sparks conversations about how to reduce disparities across the state’s localities, rather than “taking disparity for granted as the natural course of things.” County-level data for the past decade is available on the dashboard, as well as data by court level.

“What’s driving disparity in one place may not be driving disparity in another,” Jones said.