Paper Trail Begins on Racial Profiling

Beginning this month, there will be new ammunition in the long-running battle between Los Angeles police and civil libertarians over racial profiling: 750,000 paper slips.

That’s roughly how many forms LAPD officers are expected to file in the coming year as they begin the first phase of a new data-collection effort to track racial profiling, as required under the terms of a federal consent decree.

The effort is lauded by civil libertarians, loathed by many cops and viewed skeptically by some statistics experts, who say the resulting data may be of questionable value.

As a practical matter, it’s a huge undertaking. As of Nov. 1, officers must fill out a form on each motorist or pedestrian they stop. Using a blue or black pen, or a No. 2 pencil, and taking care to fill in the little circles completely, they must answer about a dozen questions, including: Of what “apparent descent” is the person (white, black, Hispanic, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, American Indian or other)? Was the person frisked? Why was the person stopped?

The LAPD thus joins scores of police departments across the nation collecting data on stops. Complaints that blacks and Latinos are unfairly targeted in traffic and pedestrian stops is one of the most troubling problems in law enforcement these days, and data collection has become the solution of choice.

Civil rights advocates argue that it is crucial because it will reveal patterns of bias in law enforcement and because officers might think twice about stopping people based on race or ethnicity if they are forced to fill out forms every time.

But Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, while acknowledging that the LAPD has no choice but to accept the new requirement, is among those who doubt its value.

Police union officials are also critical. “This is very alarming. Officers fear how it will be used against them,” said Lt. Ken Hillman, a director of the Police Protective League.

Police Commission President Rick Caruso, who jokingly compares the new forms to an SAT test, also has raised concerns that the requirement may be a waste of time.

The theory behind data collection is simple. Find out who the police are stopping and you can determine whether law enforcement reflects patterns of racial bias.

But keeping track of the ethnicity of people stopped by police is one thing, researchers say. Figuring out just what all the data mean is another. There is no established methodology for analyzing racial profiling data. And interpreting it requires complicated calculations of many variables, making it difficult, if not impossible, to assess fairly, according to several experts.

This seems especially true in Los Angeles, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country, where the difficulty of analyzing data on race and traffic stops befuddles even the likes of Rand Corp. PhDs.

“I’m pretty sure any data that is collected can be characterized in a number of different ways,” said Jack Riley, director of Rand’s criminal justice program, after making a preliminary review of the problem for the LAPD. “I don’t think you will ever be able to prove with a large data set any kind of systemic problem with racial profiling.”

The issue of racial profiling of motorists and pedestrians by police officers has gained momentum in recent years. Calls for data on traffic stops have become a standard response to complaints and lawsuits alleging racial profiling in California and elsewhere. More than 60 police agencies statewide now engage in some kind of data collection, and several states have laws requiring it.

Surveys show that a wide swath of the public believes that African Americans, in particular, are treated unfairly when it comes to traffic stops. Litigation over highway stops and drug searches on the East Coast have further propelled the issue to national prominence.

But there are differences between the way law enforcement is conducted on highways and in urban areas such as Los Angeles.

Population figures provide, at best, a rough guide. Many factors may justifiably affect the racial and ethnic patterns of traffic stops.

The population of Los Angeles is not just diverse, it’s mobile. A neighborhood that has mostly black or Latino residents may also have a large percentage of white drivers during certain commuting hours, complicating the question of what is an appropriate racial balance of police stops.

Varied types of police activity, such as specialized anti-gang units, may also influence the issue.

It’s difficult to take all these factors into account. But USC professor Howard Greenwald was able to complete such a study for the Sacramento Police Department.

Greenwald spent more than a year analyzing forms filed by Sacramento police, measuring the data against a host of variables, from traffic patterns to the racial and ethnic makeup of parole populations.

The result was a highly complex and nuanced picture of ethnicity and law enforcement. Although more than twice the percentage of blacks were stopped by police for minor violations than are present in Sacramento’s population, racial bias did not seem to explain the disparity, he said.

Only 14% of Sacramento’s population, blacks represented 42% of suspects described by witnesses to dispatchers and 46% of parolees, both factors that give police additional cause for scrutinizing people.

More important, he said, the high percentage of blacks stopped by police appeared to be tied to targeted law enforcement in high-crime neighborhoods, which happened to be disproportionately black.

Courts have given police wide latitude to stop people in areas where crimes have occurred, and because more blacks lived in such areas in Sacramento, they got stopped more.

ACLU Disputes Study’s Findings

One lesson may be simply that you are more likely to be stopped by police no matter what your color if you frequent areas of high crime, where police tend to be more present and aggressive.

Greenwald found no significant difference in the racial and ethnic patterns of traffic stops among black, white and Latino officers. He also said the patterns seemed to permeate the ranks and were not limited to the activities of a few rogue officers.

“You put it all together and it just doesn’t sound to me that there is any strong evidence for large-scale racially biased policing,” he said.

Greenwald’s findings are hotly contested by the American Civil Liberties Union, and other studies, especially those of East Coast highways, have found patterns more difficult to explain away--a far higher propensity by police to search African Americans, for example.

Even in Sacramento, the raw numbers speak to a truth that leaves many civil libertarians uneasy: African Americans are much more likely to be stopped.

“The question is: Do they stop people based on race? We believe they do. And if they don’t, the statistics will show that,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.

But the weight of court decisions has given police wide discretion in traffic and pedestrian stops. Moreover, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the public seems inclined to give authorities more leeway on racial profiling.

And it seems likely that police will continue the practice of stopping people on legitimate but minor infractions as a means of getting a handle on more serious crimes. “It’s part of the art of police work . . . to develop probable cause to prevent crime and apprehend criminals,” said LAPD Capt. Michael Downing of the Hollywood Division.

Take efforts in the LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division to control gangs. Gangs, and related violent crime, are considered the top policing priority in the area, which covers Boyle Heights. Gang members in that area happen to be disproportionately young Latino men.

Strapped for personnel, Capt. Paul Pesqueira has assigned a number of his regular patrol officers to gang squads. On Saturday nights, these squads may be found checking on known gang hangouts. If officers find a loud party, with gang members drinking in a frontyard, chances are they will go in and cite them.

The result may be to inflate the numbers of young Latino men cited for minor violations. But Pesqueira says the merits include potentially preventing homicides. A significant number of drive-by shootings in Boyle Heights occur when gang members drink in frontyards. The police wouldn’t be doing their job if they weren’t trying to suppress such activity, he argues.

For this and other reasons, Chief Parks said a more effective method for eliminating the problem is to aggressively investigate race-bias complaints against individual officers.

Such investigations are already carried out using existing record-keeping systems, such as citations and daily activity reports.

However, because the question tends to rest on whether officers had probable cause to make a stop--which they usually do in a strict legal sense--such investigations tend not to produce the finding of a systemic problem of racial or ethnic bias, and provide little satisfaction to civil libertarians.

Collecting massive amounts of data may not be the answer to reconciling these two sides, but it’s a start, said Matthew T. Zingraff, associate dean for research at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. Data collection, however, should not eclipse other possible reforms, he said.

In focus groups, for example, racial-profiling complaints tend to center on police conduct, not the reasons for the stops. People are much angrier about being stopped when officers are rude, he said.