Low hanging fruit

Low hanging fruit

In America there is currently a “war on drugs” with the main place of focusing on these drugs is in low-income communities. Police are often pushed to target the “low hanging fruit”. What I mean by this is that police are awarded for getting more arrest and to get these arrest they tend to go to the bad neighborhoods, which are normally low-income black communities, to get “petty” arrests instead of targeting the big people who are the distributors they aim for the buyers and users. This is also due to the fact that police are required to get a certain amount of tickets and arrest in a month. This has a big impact on the black community whether you know it or not.  I recently learned of a city having a required to increase arrest and tickets to bring in money for the city. Which even more affects low-income communities.

            The effects of this starts with small charges and then in the long run these charges can prevent you from excelling and going farther in life. Some of these charges can keep you from getting into good schools and even from getting good well-paying jobs. This can affect the type of activities you get into, if you can’t get any good jobs then you may resort to other activities to get money. Which can lead to more interactions with the law. This targeting can also be one of the factors of keeping black people suppressed and preventing social mobility and growth in the black communities. Which then also affects the families of the individual who is affected by this targeting.

            Another possible effect of this is after being arrested you could be labeled a certain way which can change the way you are looked at by people and their community. There was an experiment to show how people act after being labeled a specific way. It showed that once labeled as a criminal the person would want to do bad and then start to hang out with different types of people such as criminal, that they normally would not want to be around even if that is not your normal character. People can begin to change this by trying to appeal laws and requirements that cause these things, or make it so that all your arrest can’t be in one area which would then force officers to go after other people in different communities.