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United by Anger

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

It didn’t take a federal appeals court opinion to tell Myron Walker that police commonly stop motorists because of their race.

News reports about the ruling of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court last week were not surprising but still left him shaking with anger.

Three days earlier Walker had been stopped by El Segundo police while riding as a passenger in a friend’s car. He said he was detained for nearly an hour of grueling interrogation as he sat on a curb, then sent on his way with a ticket for not wearing a seat belt.

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“I knew they were going to stop us,” said Walker, who is black. “They swung almost all the way around when they saw who was in the car. It was racist.”

As he talked, other black men present in the Crenshaw district restaurant where Walker works as a bartender nodded in agreement. William Thomas, a 46-year-old lawyer, said he is routinely stopped because he is black and drives an eye-catching luxury car.

Indeed, black men ranging from everyday workers to prosperous professionals and celebrities agree that the court had told them nothing they didn’t already know. So widespread is the belief that police indiscriminately detain them because of their color that a name has been coined for what they see as an unwritten traffic offense--DWB, Driving While Black.

Bryan Nichols, a Westside psychologist, said the perception of the problem, if not the problem itself, is so pervasive that it comes up repeatedly in anger management workshops.

“I’ve heard those stories,” said Nichols, who also is black. “It’s happened to me.”

Local law enforcement agencies or their legal representatives either deny the phenomenon is routine or that it exists at all.

Lt. Anthony Alba, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, called the federal court opinion “thoughtless and reckless.”

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Although he acknowledged that it was possible that isolated instances of racially targeted police stops could occur in violation of LAPD rules and the U.S. Constitution, Alba says the court went too far.

“To paint us with a broad brush is inappropriate and unfair to the officer on the street,” he said.

Lawyers are split on the impact of the appeals court opinion. Hugh Manes, a founder of Police Watch, a police misconduct watchdog group, doubted that there would be any change. Harland Braun, who has defended officers accused of misconduct, said the opinion would influence other judges and cause police officers to think twice before initiating illegal stops.

The 9th Circuit Court last week upheld a 1993 judgment against a Santa Monica police officer found to have violated the constitutional rights of two black men he stopped and arrested at gunpoint.

The officer had argued that the stop was justified because magazine editor George Washington and computer program analyst Darryl Hicks matched the general description of two black robbery suspects.

The appeals court, however, agreed with a lower court that the descriptions were too vague and the response too harsh. It upheld monetary awards of $10,000 to each of the plaintiffs.

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In the court’s opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt termed the case an example of how police routinely violate the constitutional rights of minorities, particularly black men, by stopping them without just cause.

“Although much of the evidence concerns the disproportionate burden police action imposes on African American men who are young and poor,” he wrote, “there is substantial evidence that the experience of being stopped by police is also common both for those who are older and those who are professional.”

To bolster that argument, Reinhardt cited news reports, studies and scholarly writings, noting that many black men have talked publicly about such experiences, including Deval Patrick, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division, and Christopher A. Darden, the O.J. Simpson prosecutor who wrote in his book, “In Contempt,” that he is stopped by police an average of five times a year.

Reinhardt also cited cases in Los Angeles involving baseball Hall of Fame member Joe Morgan, former Laker basketball player Jamaal Wilkes and Olympic gold medalist Al Joyner.

Last year, the city paid Joyner $245,000 to settle a lawsuit in which the track star contended that police had illegally stopped him twice in Hollywood within minutes.

He was so rattled by the experiences, Joyner said, that he was unable to compete in several subsequent Olympic trials.

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Bartender Walker said the Oct. 26 incident--one of two he said he has experienced since moving to Los Angeles from Texas eight years ago--also was extremely upsetting.

El Segundo police confirmed that the stop occurred but said it was legal.

Capt. Jack Wayt, head of field operations for the department, said a training officer and a trainee stopped an old Toyota Corolla driven by Walker’s friend because Walker was not wearing a seat belt. Walker says he was wearing a seat belt across his lap.

Wayt acknowledged that the two men were detained for 45 minutes but said that was because the trainee, and not an experienced officer, wrote the ticket and a notice to passenger Walker that his license had been suspended.

Walker said the stop took that long because the officers deliberately harassed and humiliated him and his friend, who is Puerto Rican.

The incident occurred, according to Walker, after he and the other man left a computer wares show in El Segundo where they had bought equipment. As they headed to an electronics store to pick up some other items, Walker recalled, they passed a squad car going in the other direction.

Both of the officers’ heads swung toward them, he said.

“We automatically knew we were going to get stopped just by them looking at us,” Walker said.

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Sure enough, he continued, the squad car made a U-turn and signaled for the Toyota to pull over.

Instead of telling them why they had been stopped, Walker said, one of the officers immediately asked, “Where are you guys coming from?”

After having them get out of the car and sit on the curb as curious motorists stared, the officers badgered them with questions, Walker said. Some of the questions--such as where they had met--had nothing to do with a traffic stop, he said.

Separating the two men, the officers would ask one a question, get an answer and then go through the same exercise with the other, Walker said.

“It got to the point I was so frustrated I asked them, ‘Why are you asking me the same questions over and over?’ ” he said. “I was so upset and nervous I wanted them to go ahead and take me to jail so I could be out of their presence.”

When they were finally released, he said, they were followed by the officers to the electronics store.

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“They just took all my joy away that day,” Walker said. “I was so full of anxiety and messed up in the head I couldn’t go to work and function.”

Tracy Shaw, a psychologist who works with Nichols in conducting anger management workshops, said such a reaction is not uncommon in such encounters with police.

“It creates a tremendous feeling of powerlessness and rage and resentment toward law enforcement,” she said.

In their workshops with adults, Shaw and Nichols said, rare is the case in which one or more black men do not bring up the issue and ask how to deal with their feelings.

Nichols--who said he was stopped without justification in Pasadena a couple of years ago--tells men that a traffic stop, no matter how unjust, is not the place to stand up for their manhood or their rights because of the potential for the situation to escalate into violence.

Indeed, many modern urban riots, including a recent one in St. Petersburg, Fla., have been triggered by traffic stops involving black drivers.

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Instead of allowing anger to get the best of them, Nichols said, men should maintain their cool, then later, if the situation warrants it, file a complaint or lawsuit, as did the pair in the Santa Monica case.

“I was proud of those guys,” he said. “My impression was they weren’t in it for the money. There was a principle involved.

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