To end racial disparities in policing, we must look beyond the data | Jennifer Eberhardt
“People are damaged. People are heartbroken. People have fear,” the dark-skinned Oakland native said, his voice amplified by outrage and pain. “People are scared of the same people that’s supposed to protect them.”
Like the others sitting with me at the long table in front of the crowd at the Oakland public library, I was part of an advisory board tasked by the California attorney general with helping to quantify and address racial profiling by law enforcement. We listened as speaker after speaker shared hurtful and humiliating stories: traffic stops turned ugly, calls for help ignored, teenage boys hassled by cops for no discernible reason, rude encounters with officers who mistook victims for criminals.
The public’s complaints were grounded in the present but set against a backdrop of brazen misconduct in a police department that had historically treated the mostly black areas of Oakland like a no man’s land, where any black face could be an enemy.
The Oakland police department had been plagued with scandals for decades. The most notorious involved a band of vigilante cops who called themselves “the riders” and roamed the streets of the city from the late 1990s to 2000, planting drugs on innocent people, physically assaulting them, then falsely accusing them of criminal activity.
I felt ill when I learned of the victims’ accounts: A father taking his young son on his first barbershop visit had his nose broken and teeth knocked loose by a cop. A woman was forced to strip in the street while one officer searched her and another planted a rock of cocaine in the trunk of her car. A minister leaving a funeral service was stopped and searched by a cop who slid a crack pipe into his pocket, then hauled him off to jail. And more than once, officers bragged about shooting and killing their victims’ dogs, to send a clear message about who was in control.
The four officers who led the terror campaign were fired and criminally charged in 2000 with kidnapping, assault, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, but not one of them was ever convicted. The ringleader fled the country, escaping before he could be tried; juries for the others either acquitted or couldn’t agree on a verdict. A class-action lawsuit was filed, with 119 plaintiffs, all but one of them black. Collectively, they had spent more than 14,665 days (approximately 40 years) behind bars for crimes that never occurred. In the end, the lawsuit, filed by the civil rights lawyers John Burris and Jim Chanin, led to a $10.9m settlement for the plaintiffs and federal oversight of the Oakland police department.
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The oversight agreement required the department to collect data on police stops by race. But it took nearly 10 years for the department to collect the kind of reliable data needed to figure out who was being stopped. In the spring of 2014, I was brought in as a subject matter expert to help analyze the data, determine whether there were significant racial disparities, and suggest ways to improve police-community interactions.
I soon recruited a group of researchers at Stanford to assist in the cause. Together, we analyzed over 28,000 police stops that occurred in 2013 and 2014. We found that roughly 60% of the stops officers made in Oakland were of black people, although they made up only 28% of the Oakland population at the time. Black people were disproportionately stopped even when we controlled for factors like the crime rate and the racial breakdown of residents in the areas where the stops took place.
We found that not only were black people significantly more likely than white people to be stopped but black people were significantly more likely to be searched, handcuffed and arrested. In fact, while 72% of Oakland police officers had handcuffed a black person during the course of a stop – even when no arrest was made – only 26% of officers had handcuffed a white person who was not arrested.
But institutional change requires looking beyond data on traffic stops. As clear as the racial disparities in policing were, we could not say that the differences were due solely to the racial biases of individual officers. There were too many cultural and procedural forces within the department that could influence officers’ choices on the streets, including department policies, enforcement strategies and supervisors’ direct commands to their officers.
In fact, the same disparities that community leaders view as proof of racial profiling have been cited by police officers as proof of who is most likely to commit crimes. In Oakland, for example, 83% of violent crime was attributed to black people in 2014. From a law enforcement perspective, the extreme racial disparities that show up in police stops are aligned with those crime rate stats, validating the focus and scope of their crime-fighting tactics.
In cases like this – with two diametrically opposed interpretations of what the same numbers mean – data collection alone, without additional levers to access, cannot close the breach. It’s hard for the voices of community leaders to compete with what officers see and hear every day as they patrol the streets.
“MALE BLACK.” “MALE BLACK.” “MALE BLACK.” “MALE BLACK.” On a typical day, an officer on patrol might hear that dispatched description 300 times – or 1,200 times a week, 50,000 times each year. I can only imagine the impact of that constant refrain.
When “MALE BLACK” is broadcast over the police radio, it is seldom followed by substantial descriptions. Sometimes members of the public who call the police may offer a rough estimate of the age or height or weight of the suspect, or possibly a vague description of his clothing. But virtually every description that police on patrol receive includes a basic gender-race pairing.
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This is where procedural justice training, a type of restorative training that departments around the country have come to embrace, might come in. The focus is not on tactics but on building healthy relationships with the public. The goal is not to tally up as many stops as possible, but to improve the quality of each interaction once a stop has occurred.
The training aims to override a reflexive reliance on bias by encouraging officers to consider how they talk and how they listen to everyone they encounter on the job. It prods officers to behave in ways that are more in line with their ideal selves. This means that they give members of the public a chance to tell their story. They listen and consider community members’ concerns. They apply the law fairly and impartially. They act in a manner that the public will find respectful. They present themselves as authorities who can be trusted. And they do this not just at community meetings but every day, on every street, in every encounter. Both research and real-life experience have shown that if officers act in accordance with four tenets – voice, fairness, respect, trustworthiness – residents will be more inclined to think of the police as legitimate authorities and therefore be more likely to comply with the law.
How we are policed not only impacts the person at the center of an officer’s attention, but those observing nearby. I remember a sunny day in February 2008. I’d just spoken at a conference on the death penalty in Monterey, California, and my husband and our three boys had come down from Palo Alto to join me. We were walking back to the hotel when we stopped to rest at a quiet local park. Once I caught my breath, I noticed a police officer walking up to a young black couple seated at a picnic table next to ours. The police officer began directing his attention to the teenage boy. I was stunned by how suddenly the atmosphere in that tiny space had changed. The officer began checking their IDs and calling the information in on his radio. Another officer showed up in a cruiser. The girl flipped open her cellphone and made a call. “We were just out here sitting in the park. I don’t know why they’re stopping him. What should I say? What should I do?” I could hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the line, but I couldn’t make out her words. I imagined a mother, about to be worried sick.
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It turned out that a crime had been committed nearby and the boyfriend matched a description of the suspect. MALE BLACK. The officers asked him to stand; one pulled out a camera and began photographing him – right there in the grassy picnic area next to Fisherman’s Wharf. The teenager stood stiffly as the officer’s camera clicked and families around us impassively looked on.
I wondered what I would say over the phone the day my own son called with fear in his voice, because he or a friend was inexplicably stopped and questioned by police. I felt suddenly frozen, unbearably aware of all the ways their lives would change as they moved beyond the bubble that boyhood in suburbia provided.
My boys were going to grow older and they were going to be fearful and the cops were going to be fearful – unless we all could find a way to free ourselves from the tight grip of history.
From BIASED by Jennifer L Eberhardt, PhD, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2019 by Jennifer L Eberhardt.
Dr Jennifer Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford and a recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “genius” grant. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She is the cofounder and codirector of Sparq (Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions), a Stanford center that brings together researchers and practitioners to address significant social problems.