| In a switch, police invite scrutiny of racial profiling |
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By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
DENVER — By the time police Sgt. Robert Motyka
responds to the disturbance call at a local hospital
emergency room, the man at the reception counter
is clearly agitated.
His speech is unintelligible. He becomes frantic
as the officer slowly approaches, urging him to
calm down. In a blur of flailing arms, the man
reaches for something in his back pocket.
Motyka has no time to consider the possible
consequences of one of the most potentially
combustible scenarios in America: a
confrontation between a black man and a white officer.
When the man pulls a knife and lunges forward,
Motyka drops him with four quick pops from his
9mm Beretta. But there will be no public
second-guessing of the 13-year veteran's actions.
No racially charged demonstrations by civil rights
activists. No calls for a review of police dealings
with minorities.
In this case, Motyka was reacting to a large-screen,
video simulation designed to test officers' judgment
when using lethal force and scrutinize their dealings
with minorities. In the end, the officer acted
appropriately, according to his examiners.
The live-ammunition exercise, confined to the
department's shooting range, is part of a growing
body of research and training in nearly a dozen
law enforcement agencies across the country
aimed at eliminating persistent racial profiling
by police. Researchers are examining virtually
all facets of police behavior, from officers' interactions
with new immigrants to car stops and the use of
lethal force. More unusual, criminal justice analysts
say, is that police officials are inviting the increased
scrutiny, representing a generational change in
law enforcement in a country that is now 34% minority.
If the July White House "beer summit" was supposed
to offer a simple teaching moment after the high-profile
arrest of a black Harvard scholar by a white Cambridge,
Mass., officer, the research in Denver and elsewhere
could provide some of the most instructive case studies
on the intersection of race and law enforcement,
some police analysts say.
"Law enforcement's willingness to confront issues of
race represents a huge shift in modern policing," says
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive
Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank. "I think
you would be hard-pressed to find another institution in
America more challenged by race than police. Coming
out of the civil rights era, most departments were
viewed (by minority communities) as occupying armies."
Wexler is leading a review of the Cambridge Police
Department's role in the arrest of Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates and convened the first meeting of
a special panel there last week.
Gates' arrest on disorderly conduct charges,
after a 911 caller mistakenly identified him as a possible
burglar at his own home, sparked a heated national
debate over racial profiling and prompted President Obama
to criticize the police. Obama later apologized for saying
police acted "stupidly" and hosted Gates and the
arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, in an effort
to move the nation past a legacy of mistrust between
police and minority communities.
Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, an associate
dean at George Washington University Law School,
says some of the ongoing research is "promising,"
including the work in Denver. "Police need to acknowledge
there is a big problem," says Butler, who analyzes race
and the criminal justice system. "I just don't think the
police are there yet."
The Denver Police Department has served as a
research laboratory on race for about five years.
Yet in the past two years, the work has intensified
as hundreds of officers have volunteered for
rigorous testing to identify racial and gender bias.
That includes blunt questions about all officers'
views on race and the simulated use-of-force scenarios.
It is overseen by an unusual partnership between a
prominent academic, Phillip Goff — a social psychology
professor at the University of California-Los Angeles
and a former assistant to Gates — and a top local law
enforcement official, Denver Deputy Police Chief
Tracie Keesee, who has a doctorate in intercultural
communications.
The rare collaboration, University of Pittsburgh
law professor David Harris says, is shattering officers'
tradition of resisting outside scrutiny, especially on
race and ethnic relations. "The history of openness
in American policing has not been good," says Harris,
who recently joined the research team.
Goff's and Keesee's national Consortium for Police
Leadership in Equity is now working with agencies
in Los Angeles, San Jose, Houston, Salt Lake City,
Toronto, Virginia Beach and Portland, Ore.
Among the areas of study for the researchers:
•San Jose. Researchers are combing through
two decades of arrest records to see whether
police have improperly targeted Hispanics and
other minorities in traffic stops and arrests for
public intoxication and disorderly conduct.
Last year, a San Jose Mercury News report
found San Jose had the most public intoxication
arrests of any city in California and that 57% of
those arrested were Hispanic. About 32% of the
city's population is Hispanic, city spokesman
Tom Manheim says.
San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis says the researchers'
access to department data is "unprecedented" and
that "if there is some evidence of biased policing,
we want to know whether we're missing something
in recruiting, hiring or training."
• Salt Lake City. Researchers are examining the
impact of controversial state legislation that allows
local police to enforce federal immigration laws,
including the detection of illegal immigrants.
Among the department's concerns, Salt Lake City
Police Chief Chris Burbank says, is that the law
is fostering mistrust of police in Hispanic communities
and discouraging Hispanics — legal and illegal —
from reporting crimes. About 30% of the city's
population is Hispanic, Burbank says.
•Houston. Researchers are studying stun-gun use
after a 2008 city audit found that black suspects
are disproportionately involved in stun-gun incidents.
About 25% of Houston's population is black.
The audit of 1,417 stun-gun uses from 2004 to 2007
also found that white and Hispanic officers were more
likely than black officers to fire their stun guns
when suspects were black.
In each city, Goff says, police invited the scrutiny.
"My sense is that law enforcement is in the midst
of a sea change in leadership on this issue," he says.
Tense relations in Denver
Denver has not had the incendiary racial profiling
incidents that have plagued some other cities.
It has avoided the iconic images of the 1991 Rodney King
beating in Los Angeles or the national uproar after the
1999 mistaken fatal shooting in New York of black
immigrant Amadou Diallo.
Yet Denver, like most other large U.S. cities,
has not been immune to officers' struggles with race.
Joseph G. Sandoval, a criminal justice professor at
Metropolitan State College of Denver, says the
police department has labored to overcome a
reputation for aggressive treatment of minorities.
One of the most controversial incidents occurred
in July 2003. During a domestic disturbance call, an
officer fatally shot a 15-year-old mentally disabled
black child who was wielding a knife at his family's home.
The officer was suspended for "tactical and judgment errors"
related to the encounter; a city review of the incident
concluded he helped force the confrontation. Less than
a year after the shooting, the city settled a civil lawsuit
for $1.3 million filed by the boy's family.
Since 2005, activists, including Lisa Calderon, an organizer
for the Denver group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence,
have accused police of racial profiling in their enforcement
of a citywide "broken windows" policing strategy.
The concept is that cracking down on small crimes,
including vandalism and public intoxication,
will reduce the likelihood of more serious crime.
Calderon says the strategy has targeted minorities
and has demanded that the department change its tactics.
Keesee says the unsettled relations between the
minority community and police prompted the
department to confront delicate issues, from gender
and race to enforcement tactics, and led to the
collaboration with Goff.
"You have to have these conversations," she says.
Critics such as Calderon and Sandoval are encouraged
by the research on possible bias. "I think there is a
commitment to change the culture," says Calderon,
who is working with the department to secure
a $400,000 private grant to create a community
"immersion" course for new police recruits.
The goal, she says, is to require recruits to
spend time in the communities they will police
before they start working the streets.
In one of the most elaborate research efforts,
consortium investigators have tracked 200
Denver officers since 2004 to try to measure
which is more effective in reducing racial or
ethnic bias: experiences in the training academy,
or time patrolling.
The work grew out of an earlier project involving
about 124 Denver officers and a sample group of civilians.
That review, published in 2007, used an interactive
computer program to determine that both police and
civilians displayed "robust racial bias in response speed"
in shooting scenarios involving racially mixed targets.
Researchers also found that officers were less likely
to shoot when they shouldn't.
"It can be a daunting proposition to start something
like this," says Joshua Correll, an experimental social
psychologist at theUniversity of Chicago, who is
leading the 200-officer review.
"Historically there has not been a lot of trust
between police departments and academia."
Diallo shooting a 'turning point'
One of the most important catalysts for change
among police departments, Wexler says, was the
Diallo shooting in New York a decade ago.
In that case, four officers fired 41 times at Diallo,
who they wrongly believed was pulling a gun.
Police later determined he was reaching for his wallet.
"That was a huge turning point, showing that
racial profiling does exist," Wexler says.
It's no coincidence that on the Denver police range,
the video-simulated shooting scenarios display
eerie similarities to some of the nation's most
tragic confrontations between police and minorities,
including Diallo's.
Motyka, who has never fired on a live target in
13 years on the force, acknowledged thinking
before shooting that the man in the hospital video
— like Diallo — "could have been pulling out a wallet."
But Motyka says the only factor that influenced
his decision to shoot was the threat of the knife,
and the man's race played no role.
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