 |
Photo By Matt Borgerding
|
Does "black" mean "criminal" to police on patrol?
|
You're driving at a legal speed, signaling your turns and obeying traffic signals, when red and blue lights pierce the darkness behind you. A few minutes after pulling you over, the police officer cites you for driving without proof of insurance.
The officer only knows you don't have an insurance card because he asked you for it. But why did he stop you in the first place? Because you're black, and this is Cincinnati.
Racial profiling happens. The police chief admits it, the
mayor admits it and people know it from experience. Perhaps
most important, traffic tickets issued
by the Cincinnati Police Division to African-American
drivers are significantly different from tickets issued to
white drivers.
According to a CityBeat analysis of traffic citations issued by Cincinnati Police, officers cited four times as many blacks for driving without proof of insurance as they did whites. Blacks received three times as many tickets for jaywalking as did whites, three times as many citations for blurred windshields and twice as many citations for improper lights.
That kind of disparity by itself should raise questions. After all, blacks
are a minority of drivers. Why would they receive three
to four times as many tickets of any kind?
CityBeat analyzed more than 141,000
traffic citations, contained in more than 108,000 tickets
written by Cincinnati Police officers, during a 22-month period.
The analysis raises difficult-to-answer questions about the
role of racial profiling in the enforcement of traffic laws.
Some of the statistics would seem to prove racial discrimination on their face. Much is said about driving while black. But about walking while black? From March 1999 through December 2000, Cincinnati Police charged 801 black pedestrians with jaywalking, compared to only 230 whites. Why would blacks and whites receive such different numbers of citations?
The analysis shows blacks drivers receive proportionately more tickets for such secondary offenses as driving without a license, driving without proof of insurance and driving without a seat belt. Do officers stop black drivers for good reasons, such as speeding or running a red light, then issue a lesser ticket to give the drivers a break, as a few retired black officers suggest? Or do officers unjustifiably stop black drivers, then stick them for secondary offenses? Do whites wear seat belts more often?
Numbers alone won't answer these questions. That's the hard part about determining racial profiling: It's difficult to account for all of the variables. What is the driving-age population, and how many of each race were driving when these tickets were written? Of those, how many were breaking the law?
No one knows. In the end, the numbers raise more questions than they can answer.
Measuring the difference
Cincinnati Police officers issued 108,132 traffic tickets, containing 141,216 citations, between March 1, 1999 and Dec. 30, 2000. Comparing the types of violations charged to drivers of different races shows officers are clearly giving more secondary tickets to black drivers, according to David Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo and an expert on racial profiling.
"That indicates a high level of discretion is being used," Harris says.
CityBeat's analysis shows:
·Cincinnati Police officers cited 7,967 blacks for driving without a license -- compared to 3,043 white drivers.
·Cincinnati Police officers cited 7,290 blacks for driving without a seat belt -- compared to 3,118 whites.
·Cincinnati Police officers cited 4,192 blacks for driving without proof of insurance -- compared to just 972 whites.
Steven Mastrofski, director of the Administration of Justice program at George Mason University, says the Cincinnati Police data indicate something might be amiss; but he cautions against concluding more than that.
"You have smoke," Mastrofski says, "but you don't know that you have fire."
Harris, who last year testified about racial profiling before a U.S. Senate committee, agrees the numbers show racial disparities -- not necessarily racial profiling.
To be sure, tickets alone are not a complete picture of how police enforce traffic laws. For that, Harris says, every police stop would have to be tracked, including ones that don't result in traffic tickets. But the Cincinnati Police don't keep such statistics.
In order to understand what the 141,216 traffic citations might represent, you need to know the population they came from -- and we don't. Blacks, who make up 37.5 percent of Cincinnati residents ages 20 to 64, according to the 1990 U.S. Census, received 41.3 percent of the tickets and 46.8 percent of the citations. But more whites than blacks have driver licenses, according to the 1995 National Personal Transportation Survey by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Nationwide, about 92 percent of whites age 16 and older have licenses, compared to just 74 percent of blacks.
But even if we knew how many white drivers and how many black drivers lived in the city, there's more to consider. What about all the traffic using Interstate 71, Interstate 74, and Interstate 75, asks Cincinnati Assistant Police Chief Richard Biehl. Finally, asks Case Western Reserve University law professor Lewis Katz, how much of the city's commuter traffic comes from suburbs, which generally have fewer black residents?
Ultimately, numbers by themselves cannot prove or disprove racial profiling, because the practice is a phenomenon defined by individual psychology and personal experience, a mix of hunch and prejudice in detecting criminal activity. Numbers can show patterns of police activity, but cannot prove officers' motivation.
"You're trying to say, 'What is the heart of the officer?' " Biehl says. "And that's something you can't put numbers around."
One of the citations that Cecil Thomas finds troubling is jaywalking. Thomas, who retired from the police division last year, heads the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Shown the ticket data collected by CityBeat, he wonders why blacks would receive three times as many jaywalking tickets as whites.
Thomas' theory? A white officer is more likely to write a ticket for a black jaywalker in the West End at 4 a.m. than for a white jaywalker in Western Hills at the same time. The 801 pedestrian violations rank 17th in citations Cincinnati Police issued to blacks. For whites, pedestrian violations ranked 29th.
"That says, wait a minute, why not just warn the individual?" Thomas says.
Some secondary traffic citations might have something to do with economics, according to Harris; maybe black drivers have cars in poorer condition and are more likely to get cited for equipment violations.
But even prominent members of racial minorities have reported profiling and harassment by police. In Texas, U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela has twice been stopped and questioned by U.S. Border Patrol agents on his way to court. Cincinnati attorney Kenneth Lawson says he, too, has been racially profiled -- pulled over by police, with no ticket or charge, because of the way he looks: He is black.
"I've been stopped at Cincinnati Airport by DEA," he says. "I've been stopped by police at gunpoint. I have been surrounded by Cincinnati Police undercover because I had a 1963 Impala with tinted windows."
When Lawson began soliciting statements from black Cincinnatians who believe they have been subject to racial profiling, more than 300 came forward. But despite the police chief's acknowledgment that racial profiling has occurred, Biehl says the police division has not identified a single case in which race was the primary reason an officer stopped a driver.
"There has been no disciplinary action to date relative to the subject of profiling," says police spokesman Lt. Ray Ruberg.
Knowing isn't the same as proving
More than one year ago Police Chief Thomas Streicher admitted some officers racially profile citizens, but added the practice isn't tolerated.
In his 30 years on the force, he has seen officers cross the line of good conduct, Streicher says.
"Have they occurred recently? I don't know," Streicher says. "I'm not on the street right now."
Streicher's comments at a League of Women Voters forum last year set the table for the heated debate in progress among the police, city council, lawyers and citizens.
The issue seemed to die down in the spring as Cincinnati City Council requested hard numbers on traffic tickets. The police conducted their own analysis of the 66,068 traffic tickets issued in 1999. Finding 41 percent of the tickets went to blacks -- a number close to their proportion of the population -- the report concluded there was not "a pervasive problem of unconstitutional stops of citizens by Cincinnati Police officers." The report said the police would wait for recommendations by the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police before starting to collect data for every traffic stop.
 |
Police Chief Thomas Streicher admits racial profiling
occurs in Cincinnati.
|
Then, on election night, Roger Owensby Jr., a young black male, died in police custody of mechanical asphyxiation after being restrained by Cincinnati Police officers. Why was he stopped? There's still no answer, but a grand jury has indicted two officers for involuntary manslaughter and assault. Three other officers are on administrative leave.
Owensby's death moved profiling to the top of council's agenda, attracting protests and litigation. A team of attorneys is preparing a class-action lawsuit involving all types of police misconduct.
Lawson, Alphonse Gerhardstein and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Scott Greenwood spent much of January holding public meetings to gather anecdotal evidence of police wrongdoing.
The lawsuit will likely be filed in the next few weeks, Lawson says. If the case proceeds the same way an analysis of New Jersey State Police highway stops did in the mid-1990s, it could provide a detailed statistical answer and change the way Cincinnati Police enforce the law.
Assistant Chief Biehl said last week the division is almost ready to hand over electronic versions of tickets requested by the attorneys -- the same type of records used by CityBeat for this analysis. CityBeat obtained the records last year through a request under the Ohio Public Records Act.
After collecting more than 300 stories from area residents this year, Lawson has a few ideas about what's going on.
"You've got too many young white officers that, one, don't live in the city; and, two, were raised to hear, 'You need to stay out of certain neighborhoods,' " Lawson says. "They give them a badge and a gun and say, 'You got Avondale at night.' A lot of the shootings that happen are not happening because (police) are intentionally going out and shooting black men. It's because of fear -- subjective fear."
Lawson believes evidence will prove profiling, but not along a strict black/white line.
"People are saying white people get profiled, too," he says. "It's true. Young white males with long hair and Grateful Dead stickers are profiled. Young white males coming into a black neighborhood get profiled. The attitude is, why would you be in this neighborhood unless you're buying drugs?"
Biehl says the police division is addressing the issue through hiring, training, supervision and investigations. The division also recently held a public forum on how police decide to use force.
Three retired black Cincinnati Police officers, each of whom served more than 20 years on the force, generally agree with Streicher that profiling is a problem perpetuated by a small number of officers.
"You got a few officers out there that are racially profiling people," says Don Hudson of Bond Hill, who retired in 1998 after 26 years on the force. "There's no doubt about it."
But Hudson says he's not sure their behavior will show up in statistics. Hudson says it isn't surprising that blacks have more tickets related to income, such as driving without proof of insurance.
"White drivers usually don't get caught for some of the things black drivers get caught for," Hudson says.
That includes seat belt laws. In general, fewer blacks than whites use seat belts, according to Hudson. Cecil Thomas of the Human Relations Commission and James E. Hicks, who retired from the police division in December, agree with Hudson. But Hudson, like Lawson, says racial profiling isn't strictly a white officer/black driver issue.
"Black officers do it, too," Hudson says.
Some black officers want to be big shots in their communities and show white officers they're not playing favorites, according to Hudson.
Other officers seem to want to provoke a response from citizens who do not like being lectured, Hudson says. He knows firsthand.
In 1984 Hudson bought a Mercedes Benz, a model not then owned by a lot of blacks, he says. One night Hudson stopped on Race Street to drop a friend at a pool hall. An officer ordered Hudson to keep moving, so he pulled into a parking place on the street. Then the officer pulled in behind the Mercedes, tires screeching to a stop, and again ordered Hudson to keep moving.
When the officer asked for Hudson's driver license, he also handed over his police identification and told the officer to call the shift supervisor.
"If I hadn't been a police officer, there's no telling where that would have went," Hudson says.
Even so, the aggressive officer apparently had the last word. Two days later Hudson received a parking ticket. He believes he was targeted by a friend of the other officer.
New Jersey began national push
The effort to document racial profiling through traffic statistics reached national attention because of a lawsuit against the New Jersey State Police. In 1993, lawyers for a man arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike for drug possession contacted John Lamberth and told him they had encountered 25 black defendants in three years arrested on the same stretch of the turnpike, but not one white defendant, according to a 1998 Washington Post article by Lamberth.
The lawyers wanted a statistician's opinion of the situation. Were blacks being stopped on purpose? Lamberth assembled an ambitious program to document the race of traffic on the turnpike. Lamberth began two studies -- one with observers at the side of the road using binoculars to count the race of drivers, and another with a person driving on the highway and documenting a driver's race and behavior with a tape recorder.
The team of roadside observers logged 21 randomly selected three-hour sessions in June 1993, counting about 43,000 cars. The in-car observer, driving at a constant 60 mph, noted which drivers passed him and logged nearly 2,100 cars, Lamberth wrote.
The results? Blacks comprised 13.5 percent of the turnpike's population and 15 percent of the speeders. But they represented 35 percent of the drivers stopped by state police.
The work was key evidence in a 1996 ruling by a New Jersey state supreme court judge that police were unconstitutionally profiling black drivers. Two state troopers also testified their trainers told them to use race as a way to pick drug suspects.
That study focused on a particular stretch of turnpike. How do you study traffic patterns over a major city? Cincinnati Police considered a similar study, consulting a University of Cincinnati criminology professor for about two months last summer, according to Biehl. But the division wasn't confident roadside observations would produce accurate numbers, so it abandoned the idea, Biehl says.
Harris says the department has to realize the public is crying out for transparency -- for some independent assurance the division is acting fairly.
"In the end, the fact there's perception that it's going on ... is damaging," Harris says. "They've got to realize that perception is their enemy, not the people who hold it."
Just because there is no perfect way to collect data doesn't excuse the police from documenting anything, Harris says.
"A refusal to keep data on it is certain to be seen as adding to community distrust," he says. "It's important to begin the effort to do this ... just to have transparency."
The Ohio Highway Patrol began documenting each traffic stop Jan. 1 and will issue quarterly reports on the statistics. Other police agencies around the country have also begun keep racial data on every stop, including Louisville, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis.
By the end of this year, every Ohio law enforcement organization might be forced to do so. State Rep. Peter Lawson Jones, D-Shaker Heights, expects his profiling bill -- which foundered when first proposed in 1999 -- to get a healthy debate in the Ohio House of Representatives this year. Two weeks ago Jones reintroduced the bill, which would require all Ohio police agencies to record the race, sex and age of every driver and passenger stopped. Jones says House Bill 108 will get a good hearing, because it's headed for the House Criminal Justice Committee, chaired by of one of the bill's co-sponsors.
But good intentions can have unintended consequences, according to Keith Fangman, president of the Queen City Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police. Fangman warns increased data collection will make some officers reluctant to issue citations and make others perhaps too zealous.
Officers who once felt safe letting someone off with a warning, Fangman says, will feel obligated to write a ticket in order to prove they had a good reason to stop the driver. Some officers, he says, will probably shy away from traffic stops if they think it will get them in trouble.
 |
Photo By Matt Borgerding
|
Ken Lawson says he knows racial profiling occurs,
because it's happened to him.
|
Council tackles profiling
Cincinnati City Councilman John Cranley, chair of the Law and Public Safety Committee, is attacking racial profiling like a man possessed. Less than a month after taking over the job, Cranley and fellow council members Alicia Reece and Minette Cooper are charging ahead with plans to pass data-collection legislation. Cranley hopes council will vote on an ordinance by the end of March.
If council finishes that agenda, it will likely spend more time on profiling than any other issue except the city's budget and riverfront development; and it will have dealt with it at a sprinter's pace. Then again, city council has a history of hedging on complex issues.
Meanwhile, the police division is doing its best to eliminate the problem. Thomas says police supervisors would much rather solve the issue of profiling without outside help.
"Any police agency, especially Cincinnati, does not want to lose control of what it does," Thomas says.
Cincinnati Police aren't ignoring the issue, Biehl says. If a citizen complains about an officer, internal investigations sometimes checks the officer's ticketing patterns, among other evidence.
"We are not insensitive to the issue," Biehl says.
With a lawsuit in the works and city council in an intense debate, Biehl seems unsure of what the division's next move might be.
"Everyone wants a simple answer to a complex issue," he says. "I don't know how you make it simple."
Far from being simple, racial profiling raises fundamental questions about prejudice and racial relations. Even seeming allies disagree over what the problem is, how to resolve it -- and why.
Cranley's zeal to eliminate racial profiling gets scant approval from Lawson. In his unsuccessful campaign for Congress last year, Cranley didn't talk about racial profiling, Lawson says.
"I appreciate what he's trying to do, but I question his motives," Lawson says.
But is Lawson engaging in a bit of racial profiling himself -- questioning a politician's intentions because he is white? Cranley says he was vocal about racism and racial profiling when he ran for Congress.
"I consistently, continually and publicly opposed racial profiling in my Congressional campaign," Cranley says. "Mr. Lawson is entitled to his opinion about my motives, but it's just factually inaccurate to suggest I didn't talk about this during my Congressional campaign."
Gerhardstein, who has long championed unpopular civil-rights causes -- including inmates hurt during prison riots in Lucasville -- says racial profiling happens for the same reason other kinds of injustice occur.
"Why were people enslaved?" Gerhardstein says.
Notions of ethnic and racial superiority are ingrained, and sometimes subtle. But equality under the law requires police to reject a profile that black and criminal are one and the same, he says.
"It still stems from the notion that African Americans are shifty and engage in illegal activities in a place where a black person is easier to be viewed as doing something wrong," Gerhardstein says.
Until a combination of legislation, litigation and education ends racial profiling, Lawson recommends members of minority groups exercise prudence. If a driver is pulled over without cause, he says, the driver should use a mobile phone, if available, to call police.
"Remember when O.J. was being followed? Make sure you drive at that kind of speed to a well-lighted area," he says. "Use your cell phone to call 911 and tell the dispatcher you're just going to a well-lighted area, because you don't want to be another victim. You're not running."
At a Feb. 24 forum sponsored by the Nation of Islam, Donald Cash of Muhammad Mosque No. 5 urged African Americans to unite to combat racial profiling.
"We've got to be diligent about documenting the facts," Cash said. "When you get profiled, we've got to know names, the time of day, what the weather was. We have to work as a true black united front. You have to get with likeminded groups. Unity is as strong as an atom bomb. We have to work with the Nation, the Hebrew Israelites, the Pan-Africans, the Nationalists, the Rastafarian brothers. There's power in numbers."
But is there truth in numbers? Streicher seems skeptical. At a March 5 hearing before the Law and Public Safety Committee, Streicher said police will collect whatever data city council orders. But he warned traffic-stop data won't prove an officer is acting illegally. The problem is too complex, Streicher says.
Asked to explain CityBeat's findings -- blacks receive far more citations for jaywalking, driving without a license, driving without proof of insurance, driving without a seat belt -- Streicher says he doesn't know the reason for the disparities. Perhaps a comprehensive data analysis would help, he says. ©
Notes on the Data
CityBeat obtained electronic versions of 108,132 traffic tickets, containing 141,216 citations, issued between March 1, 1999 and Dec. 30, 2000. The Cincinnati Police Division issues tickets that document a driver's race, name and date of birth; the officer's name and badge number; the legal code for each violation; and about 20 other pieces of information. Tickets for Asians, Indians and unknown or unclassified races were combined with tickets for whites to simplify the analysis and to give skeptics the benefit of the doubt. These non-white and non-black tickets accounted for 2.2% of the total citations.
Citations for driving without a license and driving with a suspended license were issued separately by police, but were combined into one category in the top-10 citation graphics because of their close relationship to each other.
