Statistics Lend Support to Claims of Profiling

Supporting recent claims of racial profiling against Ventura County police agencies, a county public defender found last year that 96% of his clients who were pulled over for a minor auto maintenance infraction and then charged with more serious offenses were black or Latino.

In an analysis of 304 misdemeanor criminal or traffic cases during nine months ending in December, Deputy Public Defender Michael Neary said he found that 292 involved Latino or African American drivers originally stopped for faulty lights on back license plates.

Just 12 white drivers, or 4% of the total, were stopped under similar circumstances, then charged with minor crimes or traffic infractions, he said.

By contrast, Ventura County adults are about 61% white, 30% Latino and 2% black.

“Just statistically these numbers don’t line up,” Neary said. “It leads me to believe that some racial profiling is going on.”

Racial profiling--the singling out of possible suspects based solely on race or ethnicity--has gained national attention in recent years as investigations have uncovered its alleged use at the U.S. Customs Service and other law enforcement agencies, including the New York City Police Department.

Neary’s findings were presented to a state attorney general’s mediator at a private meeting July 31 after black and Latino community leaders asked for help in dealing with perceived racial bias by local police officers, including Oxnard’s, and by deputies in the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Victim Had Previous Encounters With Police

Then last month, after Oxnard police fatally shot a distraught 23-year-old black man, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the family of Robert Lee Jones alleged not only that Jones was killed unnecessarily, but that he had previously been a victim of racial profiling and was depressed because of it.

Jones was arrested by Oxnard police in March while walking to a park near his home, but was cleared by a jury of interfering with an officer. He was arrested again in July after patrolmen pulled him over for allegedly not wearing a seat belt, then charged him with possession of a handgun in his car. The case was pending when he was killed.

Police Chief Art Lopez has denied that racial profiling is a problem in his department. He said he is aware of only two Oxnard cases of alleged profiling, both filed on behalf of Jones.

Alan Wisotsky, a lawyer who represents four local police agencies including Oxnard’s and the Sheriff’s Department, said he doesn’t think racial profiling is a problem in Ventura County.

“I have probably handled 600 or 700 lawsuits involving police activity in a variety of scenarios in the last 20 years,” Wisotsky said. “And I cannot recall any that involved racial profiling,” except for a suit served on the Oxnard department last month, the day before Jones was fatally shot.

In that federal lawsuit, a black Oxnard couple, Neil and Kim Skipwith, allege that 12 gun-wielding Oxnard officers pulled them over and terrorized them after church for no reason other than their race.

Beyond the Jones and Skipwith cases, representatives of the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens say they are aware of numerous Ventura County cases in which black and Latino drivers think they have been stopped primarily because of race.

The local president of the NAACP, John Hatcher, has submitted to state investigators statements by six people alleging racial bias and profiling by Oxnard police or sheriff’s deputies.

Hatcher and David Rodriguez, district director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, expect to meet with an attorney general’s representative this week about racial profiling and the Jones shooting.

“We’re trying to get to the bottom of this and recommend changes in public policy before it gets further out of hand,” Rodriguez said.

So far, Rodriguez said he knows of five Latinos who are convinced they were stopped by local police because of profiling.

“These are individuals who are fearful of pressing an issue of racial profiling because they are immigrants and afraid of the system,” he said.

Lawyer Tina Rasnow, who runs the legal self-help center at the county courthouse, said racial profiling is a common complaint from center visitors.

“We have a lot of complaints from people who are brown-skinned who state they are harassed because of their race,” Rasnow said. “The ones stopped for some bizarre reason tend to be young male minorities.”

Rasnow, who has taught Bible school at predominantly black churches, said young black men inevitably tell a story of harassment.

“I find not one of the young men hasn’t been rousted by cops, made to lie on the ground, stopped and asked where they are going and what they’re doing,” she said. “And these are good kids. They get good grades, and they play sports. I live in Newbury Park, and the problem is every bit as bad in Thousand Oaks.”

That area is patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department.

Sheriff’s Capt. Kenton Rainey, who directs the academy where local police officers are trained, said he thinks race-based policing occurs here and elsewhere, regardless of classes that stress the need for color-blind law enforcement.

“If anybody is trying to say police don’t stereotype people, I disagree,” said Rainey, the highest-ranking black officer in the Sheriff’s Department. Rainey said certain officers feel that if they target people of a specific age and race, their chance of detecting criminal activity is much higher.

“And in one out of 10 they may actually hit the jackpot,” Rainey said. “But they never pull over the other 90% of society, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And what they overlook is that the other people they’ve stopped are [angry] because they were stopped for no reason. That alienates the minority community even more.”

Recruits Trained ‘to Act Outside of Stereotypes’

Sheriff Bob Brooks said it’s true some deputy recruits come to his department with prejudices.

“Police officers are human beings, and all of us have biases and make presumptions and create stereotypes,” Brooks said. “We train them to act outside those stereotypes.”

As a result, Brooks said, not one race-related citizen complaint against the department has been sustained in more than 1 million public contacts since 1995. And only a few claims have been filed.

“But there’s certainly a perception that we deal with,” Brooks said. “If you have a belief that you are being focused on because of your ethnicity, you might think a routine stop was profiling.”

One complaint involves Disneyland employee Kwesi Parker of Fullerton, a young black man who had returned home to Oxnard for a belated Christmas in 1999 and was stopped by sheriff’s deputies in a 50-minute confrontation near Thousand Oaks.

After deputies pulled Parker and his brother, a UCLA student, to the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway, Parker said, he thought he might be killed as he tried to respond to directions an officer barked through a bullhorn.

“The officers ordered me to unlock the door with my left hand and open it from the outside,” Kwesi wrote in a complaint. “I did this cautiously, knowing that I was close to death if any of them thought I would pull out a weapon with my left hand.

“As I stepped out . . . I took a look at the officers. There were at least four, two or three with shotguns pointed directly at my head.”

Parker said deputies finally told him they were searching for a black man who had robbed a Camarillo bank.

Brooks said deputies acted strictly within department policy. “If there is any kind of general description--and you’re not just dealing with race but age and a number of things--then it’s probably going to be a felony pull-over,” the sheriff said. “We’re not always going to be right. And in this case, we apologized.”

For Brooks, current allegations are a rerun of an incident in February, when a black journalist who had covered the city of Moorpark for just three days alleged that a deputy stopped him solely because of his race and required five pieces of identification before he was allowed to continue his work.

Brooks concluded that Jennings’ questioning was justified because the deputy mistook the reporter for an unlicensed cell phone salesman the officer had dealt with the day before.

About public defender Neary’s survey, the sheriff said deputies routinely stop motorists whose license plates are unlighted because “disabling license plate lights is a common practice by those having warrants or preparing to commit a crime.”

Neary said a pattern of apparent profiling jumped out at him when he worked last year as the public defender handling misdemeanor arraignments at the county courthouse in Ventura.

As a resident of the Westlake section of largely white Thousand Oaks, Neary said it seemed odd to him that so many cases from there involved racial minorities. “It leads me to conclude,” he said, “that a lot of people are being stopped for driving while black or brown.”