Fifty years of original, handwritten Shreveport arrest records that were discovered in an elevator shaft have laid the groundwork for years of research for the director of LSU Shreveport’s criminal justice program.
Chris Hale and his students have been slowly and painstakingly digitizing these records over the past several years. Now, Hale has populated a small but growing sample -- about 7,000 entries in his database.
The records span 1950 through the 1990s. Hale has begun crunching the numbers. His pie charts show stark trends.
“As the decades progressed, a black person’s likelihood of being arrested increased significantly, while a white person’s likelihood of arrest decreased significantly over that time period,” Hale said.
The volumes of oversized ledgers are housed in the special collections of the LSUS Noel Memorial Library. Hale says the arrest records provide basic information on the person being booked: name, address, alleged crime, arresting officer, age and race. He says so far the data matches up with what was happening in history.
Hale can see the unprecedented expansion of the drug war of the 1990s. He says primary documents like this are a rare windfall for criminal justice researchers like him.
“Nobody’s ever done this before. These are log books that were essentially sealed. Because of that, they’ve never been digitized. They’ve never been analyzed. It’s neat to be on the forefront of doing that,” Hale said.
Hale will present his findings in a speech Friday, Sept. 11, at the LSUS Science Building beginning at 11 a.m. The talk is titled: “Does Race Matter? An Investigation of Historical Arrest Records in Northwest Louisiana.” The 50-minute presentation is free and open to the public and includes time for questions.
The event is part of LSUS's College of Arts and Sciences Lecture Series. The series continues with La Wanda Blakeney presenting “Songs of the Civil War” on Sept. 18, Bronson Hall 103; Christina Vella presenting “George Washington Carver: A Brilliant Botanist, a Saintly Eccentric” on Sept. 25, library 3rd floor.
