The San Francisco Chronicle provided an update in an article today on a case involving minority residents of Section 8 housing in Antioch, California, that was first written up by the Race Equity Project E-Newsletter a year ago.  The subject of E-Newsletter 3.6 was the intersection of criminal law, race, and poverty law practice.  The specific case was described in the article titled, “Targeted Enforcement of Section 8 Participants in Antioch.”  The case, brought by Bay Area Legal Aid and Public Advocates, Inc. on behalf of primarily African-American Section 8 tenants in the city of Antioch, alleged that the City’s special police enforcement division, called, the “Community Action Team” (CAT), had systematically targeted Section 8 tenants for police enforcement (“over-policing”) in an effort to drive those tenants out of Antioch and, in so doing, had violated those tenants’ civil rights.

The SF Chronicle reports that criminologist Barry Krisberg‘s recent study confirmed that “Antioch’s police Community Action Team … has disproportionately concentrated on subsidized Section 8 housing for the poor, and even more so on black tenants.”

The CAT website says that the CAT’s goal is to protect the right it asserts Antioch residents have “to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods…“  The purported right to be free from fear has yet to be codified in California law.  Based on what Social Cognition science tells us about how our mind’s implicit associations are primed to be unconsciously fearful of, especially, people of African descent by such things as watching the local evening news (see Jerry Kang’s article, “Trojan Horses of Race“), residents of Antioch, Section 8 tenants included, are likely caught in a vicious cycle of unfounded fears confirmed, in many of their minds, by the experience and reporting of targeted enforcement of low-income, African-American households.  Maybe what is needed, at least in part, is some anti-bias training for fearful residents of Antioch and its police officers in order to raise the impact of unconcious biases to the conscious level where they may be dealt with openly and Constitutionally.