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RACIAL
PROFILING
Driving while black or Latino isn't a crime in Eugene. But you wouldn't know that by looking at a recent racial profiling study of 18,000 traffic stops by Eugene police in 2002. Police stopped African-American drivers at a rate 2.3 times higher than white drivers. Latino male drivers were stopped at a 22 percent higher rate. Police searched Latino drivers at a rate 2.6 times higher than whites and searched blacks at a 37 percent higher rate. The data indicate that targeting minorities for stops and searches has little apparent justification. White drivers were slightly more likely to be arrested or cited as a result of stops than blacks or Latinos and minorities were no more likely to be carrying contraband. Despite the large racial disparity in the data, EPD officials do not admit there is any problem in their department. "There's no way to tell based on the study if we do racial profiling," says Police Capt. Elvia Williams. "We're examining further why we have the differences." Acting Police Chief Thad Buchanan did not return a call requesting comment. Asked what he thought of the city's racial profiling study, Eugene police union president Willy Edewaard replied, "I am going to reserve my opinion until the whole thing's done," and then hung up the phone in the middle of a subsequent question. Members of the black and Latino community say they've long heard complaints of racial profiling by Eugene police and say the city needs to acknowledge there's a problem and move to address it. "I've heard it from a lot of different folks," says Chuck Dalton, president emeritus of the local NAACP. "Virtually every black male has been stopped at least once" in Eugene under questionable circumstances, he says. "Denial is a very deep rooted thing," says Dalton of the EPD's response to the data. "They're a lot of drug addicts and alcoholics who say they're not drug addicts and alcoholics." Carmen Urbina, director of El Centro Latinoamericano says the profiling data "is a real red flag for the community." Urbina says the data clearly indicates a problem. "If you're a Latino or African-American, you're more likely to be stopped," she says. "The numbers are there, they're there," Urbina says. "Absolutely, there's a lot of work that needs to be done."
DRIVING WHILE BLACK About 89 percent of the drivers Eugene police stopped last year were white. But blacks, who make up just 1.1 percent of the local driving age population, accounted for 2.6 percent of the traffic stops of local drivers. The relatively high number of stops of local black drivers for a small local black population make for the high stop rate. The rate at which young black male drivers were stopped was especially high. There are only about 280 black males aged 18 to 29 in Eugene, according to census data. But Eugene police reported 151 traffic stops among this small group. That's a rate of more than one stop per two young black residents. Dalton says he's "not at all" surprised by the numbers, which he says match years of complaints he's heard from local black residents. In the 1980s, Dalton says the city admitted that it had been keeping a photo book of all black residents for years. In 1994, a teenager under Dalton's guardianship and another young black male were stopped by Eugene police. "They were terrified, they had guns put to their head," Dalton says. The police had somehow mistaken the two youths for an armed 35-year old Latino bank robber, Dalton says. The two young men sued and eventually won a $20,000 jury verdict, but the police never apologized, Dalton says. While the police were going after his guardian and his friend, the bank robber got away, Dalton says. "The other side of this coin is who's getting away while they're doing this" racial profiling, he says. "It's bogus," says Dalton of racial profiling. "White folks do the vast majority of drugs in this country, white folks do the vast majority of crimes in this country." Dalton says it's vital that police aren't racist. "They have a license to kill, so it's really critical to eliminate as much bias as possible." Dalton says he doesn't believe racism at the EPD is overt, but more deeply rooted. "I don't think there's a grand conspiracy there, a car-load of card-carrying Klansman." "The culture of law enforcement in America is such that they can't help but view people of color as being more criminal," Dalton says. Fear of blacks is deeply entrenched in American culture by TV and movies that portray blacks as criminals. People who haven't met minorities personally have little information to counter the stereotypes, Dalton says. Eugene officers recruited from Idaho, Montana and Oregon, states with very low minority populations, "have met virtually no people of color." "If all you know about black people and Latinos is what you see on TV, hey, we're criminals," Dalton says. "I don't think they realize that they're doing this." Police work, with its "us against the world view," and risk of injury from criminals, "just magnifies the attitude" of racial bias in society, Dalton says. "It's really a psychological issue." Eugene police managers recognize the problem, Dalton says, but they are reluctant to fight the police union to press for change. "In management in general, there's a reluctance to press forward because if they really did, they'd have to fire about 20 percent of their labor force." Police management finds it easier to "finesse" the minority community around the profiling issue than to take on big change in the department, Dalton says. "I have yet to see a police chief in this town go out and say that [profiling] behavior could cost you your job."
ALWAYS BEEN A PROBLEM Ed Coleman, a retired UO English professor and another longtime leader in the local African-American community, says he also is not surprised by the data showing blacks get stopped far more often. "It's always been a problem," he says. In 1963, the local chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) found a "systematic, patterned police bias" in stopping and interrogating blacks, according to Eugene 1945-2000 , a local history book. In 1995, an EPD survey found that 55 percent of blacks and 25 percent of Hispanics felt that officers did a poor job of treating people fairly regardless of race and class. Decades ago, Eugene police would stop black drivers with white women in the car on "general principal," Coleman says. Coleman says he warned his sons that they were more likely to get stopped when they were growing up. One of his sons was stopped while cycling, Coleman says, "He was so scared." When he himself has been been stopped, Coleman says, "I panic, my heart throbs almost out of my throat." Coleman says Eugene police have gotten a lot better over the years, although the issue remains. He praises the work of Eugene's recent police chiefs and top managers, but he remains concerned about the line officers. "Once you get the guys out on the street or in the cars, that's a different problem." Eugene had a black police chief when Leonard Cooke served in the 1990s but, "it was still a problem and he couldn't do very much," Coleman says. Coleman says he's discussed racial issues in Eugene with Eugene's new city manager, Dennis Taylor. "He's got to find out where the bodies are buried before he can do something dramatically, and he wants to do something dramatically," Coleman says. But he says Taylor has to wait to get a new police chief before starting any reforms. Capt. Williams is black, but Coleman says, "She has to be careful herself." Williams "can't do everything that she might think is necessary," he says. "There's that whole police mentality, there's a whole society there and sometimes you run into a wall there within the system." EPD should go beyond trainings and workshops to address the racial profiling problem in the department, Coleman says. The city should have an independent citizen review board to discipline officers who discriminate, he says. Coleman says the police union shouldn't resist weeding out racist cops in the department. "I don't want to see the union coming in," he says. "There's that strong blue line they will hold up in almost any situation." Finding officers that don't have a "cowboy mentality" about policing is also important, he says. "If we don't do a better job of recruiting, the problem will continue."
DRIVING WHILE LATINO Urbina of El Centro says EPD has recruited more Latino officers in recent years. "They have done a tremendous effort to do that." EPD now has 173 sworn officers of which 84 percent are white. Seven officers are Hispanic and eight are black. Those numbers are about equal to the percentage of black and Hispanic residents in Eugene. Diversifying the department has not been easy. In 1997, a consultant study found significant opposition to recruiting minorities within EPD. Officers supportive of the recruiting "perceive that the department is still dominated by a white-male-officer culture that has yet to fully accept diversity," the study by the Police Executive Research Forum found. Urbina says she has heard complaints of racial profiling from Latinos, but some others say the situation in Eugene is better than in California. "It goes all across the board." Urbina says a scientific survey of local Latinos could help establish what most think about their treatment by Eugene police. Traffic stop statistics indicate that compared to whites, Latino drivers were more likely to have multiple occupants in their car when stopped by police. Latinos were also more likely to be held for longer by police after a stop. Twice as many Latino stops lasted more than 16 minutes, compared to whites, although some of the delay could be due to language barriers. Eugene's Latino population jumped 124 percent in the last decade, and Urbina says it's important for EPD to address the profiling problem now with more diversity training before the problem grows. Emilio Hernandez, director of the UO High School Equivalency Program and a former chair of the Oregon Commission on Hispanic Affairs, says he believes that, if anything, the EPD data probably underestimates the racial profiling problem. Hernandez says he's heard many complaints, especially from young male Latinos driving nice cars and pulled over for minor traffic issues. "They felt they were being singled out and, of course, they probably were. The police aren't going to admit that." Hernandez says Latinos often don't feel that they can refuse when an officer asks to search their vehicle. "The fear factor is overwhelming." Widespread resentment of the searches in the Latino community has hurt the EPD's efforts at community policing, Hernandez says. "It comes back around to 'Why should I help the police if they are continuing to bother me?"
EPD Williams says the data showing higher stop rates and search rates for blacks and Latinos "does concern us and we're looking into it further." Williams says the department will collect another year of data and may try to count the races of drivers in the downtown area to get more accurate stop rate numbers. A larger share of the black and Latino drivers stopped were stopped in the city's downtown patrol district, where EPD concentrates patrols due to higher crime rates. Critics of racial profiling studies elsewhere have said that they reflect not racism, but admirable efforts to reduce crime in minority neighborhoods by concentrating enforcement. However, Eugene's black population isn't particularly concentrated downtown and it appears unlikely that increased downtown patrols could fully account for the large discrepancies in stop rates for blacks. Williams admits to some resistance to the traffic stop data collection project among line officers. "I'm not going to say everyone is supportive of the project." But she says the department launched the study in response to concerns in the black and Latino communities that "they are being targeted." She says even without the data, such concerns are a problem for the department. "It is a problem if people perceive it to be a problem." Williams says "we are examining" whether minorities are more likely to be traffic and criminal offenders in Eugene, but national studies have shown that "minorities are no more likely than whites" to carry drugs or weapons in cars. The department has ongoing diversity training and minority recruitment programs and is now looking for about a dozen new officers, according to Williams.
BIG PROBLEM Eugene isn't alone in dealing with the issue of racial profiling. Scores of cities and states across the nation have begun collecting data in response to minority complaints. The EPD pulled together traffic stop data from 21 cities for comparison. The disparity between Eugene's stop rate for blacks is significantly above average. Eugene had a stop rate for blacks about 2.3 times higher than whites. The other cities averaged a stop rate 2.0 times higher. The disparity in Eugene's search rate for Latino drivers was also much higher. Eugene searched Latino drivers at a rate 2.6 times higher than whites. The other cities averaged a rate only 2.0 times higher. The EPD also isn't alone in initially failing to admit a racial profiling problem. In New Jersey, the state police denied and covered up that they were involved in racial profiling for a decade despite mounting evidence. Finally, the shooting of three minorities in a van in 1998 caused the profiling issue to explode into national headlines and state police leaders to confess that profiling was a widespread problem in their department. But the powerful New Jersey police trooper union has continued to fight efforts to reform the department and has alleged minorities are more likely to be criminals. In Portland, Police Chief Mark Kroeker denied two years ago that a study showing that police stopped blacks at a rate 2.6 times higher than whites was evidence of racial profiling. But The Oregonian wrote in an editorial, "The numbers that show the existence of DWB [Driving While Black] must now be used to stop it." Kroeker was forced to resign this year in the wake of a scandal involving the police fatally shooting a black woman during a traffic stop. Distrust of police on racial profiling is widespread. A 2001 state poll found 39 percent of Oregonians think police unfairly use race to stop people. A 1999 national Gallup poll found 60 percent think police racial profiling is widespread. The issue of racial profiling has gained more attention recently after U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft launched an effort to question 5,000 Middle Eastern men on terrorism. Police chiefs in Eugene, Portland and Corvallis expressed concerns with singling people out based on race. Eugene could learn from other departments in trying to solve its profiling problem. In New Jersey a police expert suggested using undercover stings to catch profiling officers. The California Highway Patrol recently agreed to audit officer stop records to identify profiling officers and ban consent searches as part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union. Eugene police decided to not identify individual officers in its stop data. In New Jersey, individual officers confessed to forging stop data to hide evidence of profiling. Eugene police failed to report racial data for 21 percent of all traffic citations in 2002. It's unclear if Eugene police were trying to hide something or just too busy to fill out the forms. Hernandez, Dalton and Coleman say solving the EPD's profiling problem won't be easy. "I don't think there's much that we can do, to be honest," Hernandez says. "The mentality has already been set. It's going to be very unrealistic to change the mentality of every police officer." Hernandez says the city should reach out and encourage fearful minorities to help identify profiling cops who could then be retrained or fired. "It can be controlled more by educating the community members by telling them their rights and getting them to file complaints."
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