overarrest

From over- +‎ arrest.

overarrest (third-person singular simple present overarrests, present participle overarresting, simple past and past participle overarrested)

1. (transitive) To arrest at a disproportionately high rate.
   • 2017, Sharon Dolovich, Alexandra Natapoff, The New Criminal Justice Thinking, page 61:

     The emphasis on prosecution and conviction as metrics of success leads police and prosecutors to overarrest, overprosecute, and overpunish low-level drug and other crimes in many cases.

   • 2020 June 12, Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales, “Should we defund the police?”, in Capitalisn't‎^[1]:

     Sorry, I’m Italian, and let’s say I see that Sicilian policemen arrest less people in Sicily. This could be for two reasons, one is that everybody else overarrests, or the Sicilian policemen underarrest. And can you tell those two things apart?

   • 2020 June 22, Trudy Ring, “Mondaire Jones Could Be the Nation's First Black Gay Congressman”, in The Advocate‎^[2]:

     Criminal justice reform has become a national topic of discussion given recent police killings of Black men, and Jones points out that he's been a longtime activist on this issue, with his experience in Palo Alto and as an NAACP youth organizer. Also, he notes, as a Black man, "People like me are overpoliced, overarrested, overprosecuted."

   • 2023 July 19, Brianna Scott, Ailsa Chang, Jeanette Woods, “How AI could perpetuate racism, sexism and other biases in society”, in NPR‎^[3]:

     So if you live in a zip code that has been overpoliced historically, you are going to have overarresting. And we know that the overpolicing and the overarresting happens in Black and Latino communities. That's just a fact.

• underarrest