| Chapter 4
Racial
and Ethnic Issues: Story Ideas
By
Melissa Moore
Many areas of possible racial bias in policing – analysis
of traffic stops, traffic tickets, automobile searches, etc. –
have been reported often enough that there are many good examples,
several of which are listed below. Pay particular attention to racial
breakdowns for tickets that are not based on visual observation,
like expired drivers licenses or lack of insurance. Some officers
may use those as justification for having stopped someone based
on race.
Your ability to produce data-driven stories depends in large part
on access. Depending on how carefully the departments you cover
keep statistics and how much your state laws make available, you
may be able to do thorough, thoughtful stories based on superior
data. Otherwise, you might be required to report on data that agencies
outside of your area see value in keeping and to ask your departments
why they don't collect it. Don't underestimate the value in the
latter. Readers often are very interested to know what their public
safety agencies are not doing; it is sometimes just as newsworthy
as what they are doing.
Stories about how your department trains officers in bias issues
and what policies exist to reduce bias can be valuable adjuncts
to any data-driven stories you are able to write. These also can
benefit from comparisons to other departments with model policies
and model training.
Some information should be available to nearly all reporters. Almost
every law enforcement agency participates in the voluntary FBI Uniform
Crime Reports. That information makes possible such stories as an
analysis of local arrests by race and crime. This can be broken
down many ways: you can look at property crime, violent crime, whether
arrest rates are changing over time, for example. Look particularly
at the drug arrest breakdowns, which divide arrests by possession
and distribution and by type of drug. Remember that with drug arrests,
police find drugs primarily where they look, so the arrest data
may not be a barometer of who is using drugs in your community.
They measure only who is arrested for using drugs. The difference
between these two may provide fodder for a story as well.
Story Examples
The Investigative Reporters and Editors Resource Center (http://www.ire.org/resourcecenter)
has archived more than 19,000 print and broadcast stories on myriad
topics. It is searchable and always a good place to start to see
what other papers have done on any subject.
Among the available stories on racial profiling are those from
the Newark Star-Ledger's investigation of "racial profiling
in New Jersey starting with a police shooting in 1998 that forced
the state to slowly overhaul its law enforcement practices."
The Riverside, Calif. Press-Enterprise 2002 stories of how
the paper hired an analyst to examine its police department's traffic
tickets and found that black and Hispanic drivers were ticketed
at disproportionately higher rates also is available through the
Resource Center.
The Resource Center charges fees for stories from its archive.
Fees are lower for IRE members than for non-members.
Stories Available
Online
Seattle Times looked at how often stopped cars are searched
in January 2003:
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/
display?slug=racial05m&date=20030105&;query=racial+profiling
Boston Globe covered the same subject, also in January 2003:
http://www.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/traffic
The Tennessean did a traffic ticket story in 2000 that is
available online:
http://www.tennessean.com/sii/00/02/20/myprofile20.shtml
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