Racism and the enforcement of institutional racist policies by the police in Oakland was an accepted part of life to the blacks who lived there. While blacks no longer were legally excluded from living in any area of the city, they were often looked at with suspicion by the police when they entered predominately white middle or upper class communities. At night in particular, a black driving in such an area was often stopped by a white policeman. Usually the pretext would be that the man's car fit the description of a reported stolen vehicle, or the car had some defect such as no light over the rear license plate. The actual purpose however, was to allow the officer to determine why a black person was in that particular neighborhood at that time of night." 150-151
"The white officer, who was suspicious in such circumstances, often viewed himself as "unprejudiced. In fact, he may have been merely reflecting institutional subordination
"The rate of blacks killed by police has remained at least nine times higher over the last 18 years in which the statistics have been evaluated [as of 1979, when this article was written]. Although blacks only comprise 12-14 percent of the Nation's population, they comprise at least 50 percent of those killed by the police*. Even that statistic can be misleading, considering that nearly 90 percent of those killed by Philadelphia police force were black in the years studied between 1960-1970**, when the black community accounted for 22 percent of that population."
to the policies of his department which stressed that its officers should be observant and suspicious. They justified the degree of suspicion directed against blacks by arresting them at a rate disproportionate to their 30.2 percent of the city's total population. James Q. Wilson noted that in the year 1965 the arrest rate in Oakland for blacks on larceny-related charges
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