How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21280643/police-brutality-violence-protests-racism-khalil-muhammad

Social science played a huge role. What we’d call today “academic experts,” of one kind or another, were part of the effort to define black people as a particular criminal class in the American population. And what they essentially did was they used the evidence coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery. They used the census data to point to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. They were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in Southern prisons.

So that evidence became part of a national discussion that essentially said, “Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They’re committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census data is the proof.”