Race study proves nothing: Experts
By Tamsin McMahon
Local News - Saturday, June 25, 2005 @ 07:00
The newspaper headline read: “The truth about racial profiling.”
Staring up from below it were mug shots of the Toronto police department’s 20
most wanted suspects, a motley crew of murderers and rapists.
Some were heavyset; others were thin. Some looked like they could be a next door
neighbour, while others might as well have had the word “criminal” etched
into their foreheads.
But there was one unmistakable thread that bound them together: Most of the
faces were black.
The message was clear: The real truth about the recent King-ston Police study
that found officers were stopping blacks more frequently than whites wasn’t
that police were guilty of racial profiling. If police were targeting blacks, it
was because they caused more trouble.
The newspaper story and photospread were part of the strong reaction that
followed the release by Kingston Police of an analysis of a year-long pilot
project in which officers recorded the race of every person they stopped.
The analysis concluded that blacks are stopped three times as often as whites in
Kingston.
As the first study in Canada to examine the race and ethnicity of everyone
stopped by police, it wasn’t surprising that the report out of Kingston should
face scrutiny – from the minority groups who demanded swift action to the
police union who sought to discredit the findings.
But while Kingston Police came under fire, so too did the city’s small black
community of about 700 people, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding
citizens.
Where were the statistics, critics demanded, showing which racial or ethnic
groups committed the most crime?
The tug-of-war between those who see such police statistics as evidence of
racial profiling and those who see them as proof that crime can be explained by
skin colour is nothing new to social scientists in the U.S., where a small
industry has sprung up dedicated to studying racial profiling.
Those who have observed the same process unfolding in the U.S. for the past
seven or eight years offer a warning.
The kind of race-based statistics that Kingston Police collected aren’t proof
of anything. Not racial profiling, nor the colour of crime.
Rather, they say, in the right hands, this kind of statistical information can
be the springboard for police to repair frayed relations with visible
minorities.
In the wrong hands, it can be fodder for accusations that only drive a deeper
wedge between officers and the communities they police.
“The debate isn’t going to be settled by someone saying, ‘Here’s the
evidence, you’re right or you’re wrong,’ ” said Amy Farrell, associate
director of the Institute on Race and Justice at Northeastern University in
Boston, which runs a racial profiling data collection resource centre.
“It has to be seen as a tool for dialogue, not as an end result. Where police
departments get into a lot of trouble is when they see this as a pass-or-fail
test.”
The research exploring whether some racial groups are responsible for more crime
is both contradictory and incomplete.
In the U.S., African-Americans make up about 13 per cent of the population, but
account for a staggering one million of the country’s two million prisoners.
Yet a national study comparing drug use to drug convictions found that while
about 13 per cent of blacks admitted to using drugs, more than 70 per cent of
those imprisoned for drug possession or trafficking were black.
In New Jersey, a 2001 study found black and Hispanic drivers were more likely to
speed in excess of 15 miles/
hour over the limit on the New Jersey Turnpike when the speed limit was 65
miles/hour, but not when it was 55 miles/hour.
The study was largely discredited because the three researchers couldn’t agree
on the race of the driver a third of the time.
A similar study in Nevada in 2003 examined 400,000 police stops and came up with
the opposite conclusion: blacks and Hispanics were less likely to speed than
other demographic groups.
“We really haven’t moved beyond that debate,” said Khalil Muhammad, a
post-doctoral fellow in race, crime and justice at the Vera Institute of Justice
in New York City.
“The central question of how much the statistics really reflect reality is
very much up for grabs.”
In Canada, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, an arm of Statistics
Canada, isn’t allowed to collect data on race and crime.
But a Corrections Canada study of the racial makeup of federal offenders paints
a different image from the stereotypical poor, uneducated black offender.
The study, published last June, found that visible minority offenders tended to
be younger than their white counterparts. They were also more likely to be
married, better educated and employed at higher rates at the time of arrest
compared to whites.
They tended to have shorter criminal records and were therefore serving shorter
sentences and were considered a lower risk to reoffend.
Visible minorities fared better when they were released from prison and were
less likely to escape.
A large proportion of black inmates were doing time for robbery, while whites
were more likely to be serving homicide sentences.
“Visible minority offenders seem to be less ‘entrenched’ in the criminal
lifestyle than Caucasian offenders,” the report stated.
Blacks were also less likely to be deemed dangerous offenders – a label
reserved for those whose crimes are so heinous, or their behaviour so
incorrigible, that they are locked up indefinitely.
Of the 111 dangerous offenders incarcerated in Ontario, 97 are white and three
are black. Seven are Aboriginal, two are Metis, one is Asian and another is
Inuit.
Proportionally, it means 87 per cent of the most dangerous federal prisoners in
Ontario are white.
Whites make up about 81 per cent of the province’s population.
Scot Wortley, the University of Toronto criminologist who analysed the Kingston
Police statistics, has also been studying the issue of race and crime.
He conducted a study asking youth to report on their own criminal behaviour. It
found black youths were slightly more likely to belong to criminal gangs and
engage in minor violent behaviour and property crime.
White youths were much more likely to report serious drug abuse and just as
likely as black youth to be involved in drug trafficking.
He also found that because of profiling of street gangs, black youths who
committed crimes were more likely to get caught.
Members of traditionally black street gangs in Toronto reported that they were
starting to recruit whites to transport drugs across the city because they were
less likely to be stopped by police.
But social scientists say the debate over crime by race isn’t relevant to
studying the colour of people stopped by police.
Comparing crime statistics to vehicle stops is bad practice because criminals on
parole aren’t often the same people being pulled over for a broken taillight,
said Lorie Fridell of the University of South Florida, who has authored several
books on how to collect and interpret data on racial profiling.
Karen Mock, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, says
it’s not a question of who commits more crime.
“It’s a question of who gets arrested for committing more crimes,” said
Mock. “So that discussion is like throwing a red herring into the mix.”
Of the more than 8,000 people stopped by Kingston Police during the yearlong
pilot project, only 21 per cent of blacks and 23 per cent of whites were
ticketed or charged with a crime.
If police officers were hoping to catch criminals when they stopped vehicles and
pedestrians, they didn’t find them nearly 80 per cent of the time.
Toronto’s most wanted suspects aren’t likely to be caught using random
vehicle stops, said University of Windsor law professor David Tanovich, who has
acted as a lawyer in several racial profiling cases.
“When police are going out and engaging in proactive policing, they’re not
looking for the 10 most wanted,” he said.
John Lamberth, a private consultant to U.S. law-enforcement agencies who
designed the country’s first methods of studying racial profiling, also set
out to study the reasons for traffic stops.
He gave officers five minutes to decide if randomly selected vehicles were
breaking traffic laws.
Lamberth found that 94 per cent of drivers were breaking the law and it took
officers an average of 28 seconds to spot them.
The conclusion Lamberth drew was that virtually every driver is, at any given
time, breaking one of the hundreds of traffic laws, from speeding to seat-belt
violations.
The question became: If police can justify every traffic stop, why do some
people get caught when others don’t?
The quandary, along with a series of high-profile police shootings of unarmed
black and Hispanic men, prompted police departments to start collecting data on
the race of those they stopped.
Some departments began collecting the information as part of court settlements
in racial profiling lawsuits. Others began voluntarily studying traffic stops as
a way to combat growing allegations of racial profiling.
“They were sort of caught with their pants down in that they didn’t have any
information with which to counter these claims,” said Northeastern
University’s Farrell.
State governments also got involved in the debate and today about half of the
U.S. states have some kind of order in place banning racial profiling or
ordering police to collect race-based statistics.
It wasn’t surprising that the data collection projects centred around traffic
stops: It’s one of the most common police activities but, until now, one of
the least studied.
“We spend tremendous amounts of money on traffic stops that involve a huge
number of officers and yet we don’t know anything about them,” Farrell said.
“They’ve sort of been the ugly stepchild of law enforcement.”
When police departments were met with allegations of racial profiling, the
universal response was to focus on collecting statistics at the expense of
developing policies, training or outreach programs, said University of South
Florida’s Fridell.
That focus created false expectations that somehow crunching numbers was going
to end the debate.
“We can’t even measure crime,” Fridell said. “What makes us think we can
get officers to fill out forms and measure what goes on inside their heads?”
As it turned out in the U.S., thousands of studies by police across the country
showing officers stop black drivers more than white drivers haven’t done
anything to debunk the myth that blacks commit more crime.
“Most people in this country go to bed at night assuming that
African-Americans are more likely to be criminals and that it’s prudent to
keep an eye on them if they happen to live next door,” Muhammad said.
Ottawa’s deputy police chief, Larry Hill, said he expects most police
departments across Canada will be collecting race-based statistics within 10
years. But if the numbers aren’t good for gauging racial profiling or
abolishing stereotypes, for what are they useful?
On one hand, studies that have shown a huge gap between the number of minority
and white drivers stopped by police have been accepted by courts as evidence of
racial profiling in both criminal cases and civil suits, Farrell said.
The Kingston Police study could have an impact on court cases in the Kingston
area, said prominent human rights lawyer Julian Falconer.
“What the Kingston report tells us is certain groups of persons,
African-Canadians, are, in fact, treated in a fashion very distinctive from
other people in the community,” he said. “I certainly am of the view that a
plaintiff in a racial profiling claim in Kingston would be entitled to rely upon
the report as evidence of a systemic reality that makes it more likely than not
that his particular claim occurred.”
People may be more willing to raise the issue of racial profiling in court,
Falconer said, but he didn’t expect an avalanche of lawsuits against police.
“In all my years of practice, I’ve never seen a flood of lawsuits on any
given thing,” he said.
The Kingston report might also shift the burden of proof onto the police to
prove that racial profiling wasn’t a factor in a particular incident, said the
University of Windsor’s Tanovich.
Even if courts acknowledge that racial profiling exists in a general sense,
complainants still must prove it happened to them, he said.
The numbers can also be used by police departments to judge whether they are
spending their resources effectively, Fridell said.
Departments that find that concentrating their efforts on stopping cars in
high-crime neighbourhoods hasn’t cut down on problems might want to invest in
more street-level detectives and put the traffic officers in areas where there
are a lot of collisions, she said.
The fact that in Kingston so many police stops yielded no arrests or tickets
could mean that police are engaging in “fishing expeditions.”
Cast your net enough times, the theory goes, and you might just catch a
criminal.
“Shooting fish in a barrel is not a good way to do policing,” Farrell said.
Fridell recommends that police departments create a “racial profiling task
force” made up of members of visible minority communities, along with senior
managers and patrol officers, to handle the results of data collection programs.
Ideally, these task forces should be set up before the results are released and
preferably before police even design their study, she said.
The task force should hold a series of meetings to build trust and listen to
community concerns, similar to the town hall meetings that Kingston Police Chief
Bill Closs called before starting the data collection project.
Once the results are released, the task force should go back and do a more
detailed analysis, Fridell said, to decide whether the results can be explained
by biased policing or by something else, such as other problems in the
organization.
Then, she recommends, the task force should decide on specific reforms,
including recruiting more visible minority officers, designing training and
community outreach programs, and researching external funds to pay for them.
The task force could also be involved in improving the study’s methodology.
It may not even be necessary for Kingston Police to create new policies and
training if such programs already exist, Fridell said.
Opinions differ on whether Kingston Police should continue collecting and
analysing race-based statistics.
The research is expensive and if it does nothing to improve relations with
minority communities, then it’s not worth the money, Fridell said.
But Farrell said a short-term study isn’t a good way of measuring a
long-standing problem that requires a long-term solution.
“A one-time, one-year study, that’s a bad model,” she said. “Then people
think, ‘I can make it through the end of the study.’ This is a complex
problem and the perception of it is real.”
The most compelling reason for collecting race-based statistics is to sensitize
police to the issues in the community, Fridell said.
To that end, in the U.S., data collection programs have helped.
Fridell was involved in a 2001 survey of U.S. police chiefs that found few
believed racially biased policing existed.
“I’d love to do that survey today,” she said. “I think more and more
chiefs in the U.S. are taking this very seriously. There’s a different mindset
now.”
The best response for a police department to the growing controversy over racial
profiling is to acknowledge that bias policing exists, Fridell said, regardless
of what the studies say.
“Whether they look at the data and say, ‘We have an issue we need to
address’ or ‘We don’t have an issue,’ the bottom line is every
jurisdiction in Canada and the U.S. and, who knows, maybe the world, should be
thinking about it,” she said. “You don’t need data collection to know you
have to do something.”
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