| Chapter 4
Racial
and Ethnic Issues
By
Melissa Moore
A 13
Percent "Hit Rate" for Traffic Stops
A Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of people who had contact
with the police in 1999 estimated that police conducted about 1.27
million searches of vehicles or people after traffic stops that
year. Of those, nearly 170,000 provided evidence of a crime. That
adds up to about a 13 percent hit rate, which means that in more
than eight out of every ten searches, police found nothing.
PERF sums up the relevance of racial profiling to overall policing
this way: "Police personnel should understand that the protection
of human and civil rights is a central and affirmative part of the
police mission, not an obstacle to effective policing...Sacrificing
individual rights in the name of law enforcement must be understood
as a profound failure of policing, rather than a necessary tradeoff."
This concept should make good fodder for open-ended questions to
police executives.
Most reporters who have examined racial profiling or racially biased
policing have begun their research with anecdotes and data on traffic
tickets or traffic stops.
After the April 23, 1998 shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike, The
(Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger spent 18 months investigating
racial profiling by their state police. The January/February 2000
IRE Journal said that, "the investigation resulted in over
40 front-page exclusives, the dismissal of the state police superintendent,
state and federal investigations and a challenge to an ambitious
governor's political career."
Star-Ledger reporters Joe Donohoe and Kathy Barrett Carter
wrote for IRE that reporters need "ferocious perseverance",
a dedicated team of reporters and "the idea that routine requests
for the most basic information can lead to remarkable revelations."
They were stonewalled at every turn in their quest for the documents
that would ultimately tell them that the police were targeting minorities
on the turnpike to search them for drugs.
"Each 'no' meant that the paper was asking the right questions
and hunting in the right places," they wrote.
Eventually, the paper decided that the stonewalling cops was a
story in itself.
The Star-Ledger investigation led ultimately to state and
federal investigations of the department and to the dismissal of
the state police superintendent after he publicly backed profiling
as an investigative tool. The state eventually allowed the U.S.
Department of Justice to monitor court-ordered reforms to the agency
to avoid a federal civil rights lawsuit.
Reporters should bear in mind that the refusal of a law enforcement
agency to provide relevant information to a reporter is also a failure
of the agency to provide that information to the public, for whom
the agency ultimately works. Sometimes, it's necessary to bring
that to the public's attention and explain the potential consequences
for the public if the agency is permitted to withhold the information.
The key is that the story must tell readers and viewers why it's
bad for them for the police to withhold the information, not why
it's bad for the police to keep it from the newspaper.
Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader reporters John Cheves and
Linda L. Johnson looked at allegations of racial profiling in Lexington
in 1999 after a black doctor filed a lawsuit against the Lexington
Police. Cheves and Johnson prepared a handout, available through
the IRE Resource Center at http://www.ire.org,
that explained how they did their investigation and what happened
as a result.
As is the case for many police agencies, Cheves and Johnson were
able to get information only about traffic tickets, not vehicle
stops. They found that black men make up about six percent of Fayette
County's driving-age population and got nine percent of the tickets.
They showed their analysis to a statistician before publishing to
make sure they had interpreted the data correctly.
The reporters included the assessments of both police and civil
rights leaders. The civil rights leaders said citation data would
not show how often black drivers are stopped and not ticketed and
that the estimates of the black driving-age population exaggerated
the number of blacks in the county who could afford both a car and
insurance. Police countered that enhanced law enforcement presence
in black communities because of high crime rates would explain the
variations, and that with blacks more likely to be poor, they would
also be more likely to have vehicles with defective equipment and
attract the attention of police officers.
As a result of the stories, the mayor required police to record
race information on all traffic stops.
Lisa O'Neill-Hill of The (Riverside, Calif.) Press Enterprise,
reported in early 2002 on a study of racial profiling commissioned
by the newspaper in response to the 1998 shooting of Tyisha Miller,
a black woman, by four white Riverside police officers.
The Press-Enterprise study examined the issue of "pretext
stops" – police officers' using minor traffic violations
to pull over a vehicle to investigate more serious criminal activity.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled pretext stops permissible, but
the court concluded that selective enforcement of this nature where
race is the underlying reason for the stop violates the Constitution's
the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Press-Enterprise study showed that Riverside police
built pretext stops around violations such as underage driving,
driving without insurance and driving with an expired license. These
kinds of citations are important to examine because they are extremely
difficult to determine before police pull over a driver.
Claims of racial bias in policing have sometimes led to an unintended
effect – the phenomenon of "depolicing."
Depolicing means that officers, on their own, decide to stop taking
pro-active steps to engage citizens. Their point of view is that
if they don't initiate contact with members of the public, they
can't be accused of using racial biases.
Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher has explained it this way:
"If I don't stop any cars, then I can't be accused of being
a racist."
Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske calls depolicing "almost
the greatest form of racism."
When officers avoid members of a particular racial group because
they don't want to open themselves up to claims of profiling, they
effectively withhold a community service from a group of constituents
that should be available to all.
Reporters checking traffic ticket and vehicle stop data should
be aware of the issue of depolicing and keep an eye out for it.
If there is an unusual change in the number of stops, the number
of arrests or the kind of stops and arrests, that should serve as
a starting point for reporters asking questions. There may be valid
reasons for any changes that you see, but authorities should be
able to explain large changes.
In addition to traffic ticket data, some other sources that can
be mined for the investigation of racial bias in policing are citizen
complaints and their outcomes, lawsuits against the department and
the training materials and policy and procedure manuals that should
explain what police are taught and required to do with regard to
racial bias questions.
To do data analysis on tickets, reporters also will need some way
to compare tickets to driver demographics. The Department of Motor
Vehicles may be able to provide data on the number and racial breakdown
of licensed drivers who live in a particular area. If not, reporters
may have to rely on Census estimates of driving-age populations.
When dealing with tickets or police records of stops, reporters
must find out whether the officer determines the person's race or
whether the suspect provides that information. Obviously, it is
likely to be more accurate if the person being stopped identifies
the racial group to which he or she belongs. However, the officer's
belief about the person's race is relevant if the question is whether
the officer is using his or her perception of the person's race
to decide whether to make the stop.
Another measurement question that arises in racial profiling investigations
is how to measure the level of traffic on particular highways or
streets and the racial mix of people traveling there. Short of going
out there and counting yourself (which is an option), there's no
good answer and reporters have a responsibility to explain the problem
in their stories. Both NOBLE and PERF do have resources on their
web sites for law enforcement agencies looking at these issues.
They are valuable resources for reporters as well.
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