Program on Racial Profiling Urged

Ventura County’s sheriff’s academy--the principal training facility for area police--must develop a detailed curriculum to teach cadets how to avoid incidents of racial profiling, according to a grand jury report released Tuesday.

The citizen panel’s recommendation is the result of an inquiry that began more than a year ago following complaints from community groups demanding state and federal investigations of suspected racial profiling in local police departments.

“A mere understanding of cultural diversities is not enough,” the report found. “There must be specific guidelines in writing, and active, ongoing training for all law enforcement personnel as to what constitutes probable cause to detain a citizen.”

For example, the report said, training material “does not answer the question of whether it is racial profiling to stop a black male in a predominantly white neighborhood, if the only thing that makes the officer suspicious is that the man looks out of ‘place.’ Instead, the material focuses on cultural differences and how to effectively deal with them.”

Currently, the Ventura County Criminal Justice Training Center in Camarillo offers cadets 24 hours of so-called “cultural diversity and discrimination” lessons as part of a 24-week school, which includes a total of 957 hours of instruction.

While the academy’s 60 instructors are strongly encouraged to supplement their state-designed course materials with newspaper and magazine articles and other information about racial profiling, it is not required.

That will soon change, officials said. As of Jan. 1, state law mandates that all peace officers receive several hours of training on preventing “bias-based” policing.

The new curriculum--being crafted by a state committee that is working with material from a police oversight office--won’t be ready until April, officials said.

Capt. Kenton Rainey, director of the sheriff’s academy, said he believes cadets receive ample training on race issues both in the classroom and while paired with veteran officers during on-the-job training.

“I personally believe racial profiling is a problem that occurs throughout the country,” Rainey said. “We deal with the issue at the academy, but sometimes you can provide as much training as possible and somewhere, someone is going to violate” the law.

Rainey, the department’s highest-ranking black officer, said the academy far exceeds minimum state standards for training cadets in all areas of law enforcement and that racial issues are discussed in a number of classes, including those on ethics and law.

Ventura County Deputy Public Defender Michael Neary conducted a study last year finding that 96% of his clients who were pulled over for minor infractions and then charged with more serious offenses were black or Latino.

Neary said the grand jury was “absolutely accurate” with its recommendation for a more specific curriculum on racial profiling. But he said the report didn’t go far enough in examining racial inconsistencies in police work.

“The only time we stop people for looking out of place is when they are black or brown and they are in a predominantly white neighborhood,” Neary said, adding that he has never heard of a white person being stopped solely for driving through a minority neighborhood.

The public defender said he hoped the report would encourage more people to come forward with their stories of racial profiling and other mistreatment.

While the county’s top law enforcement officials have repeatedly contended that racial profiling is not a problem locally, county, state and federal officials continue to investigate the issue following several citizen complaints.

One incident being investigated involves Robert Lee Jones, a 23-year-old black man whom Oxnard police officers shot to death last August. Jones’ family has said he was killed unnecessarily and was depressed at the time about being the victim of earlier racial profiling by officers.

John Hatcher, president of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, alerted state investigators about racial profiling in Ventura County. He said he agrees with the grand jury’s recommendation about additional training but believes it stops short of solving the problem.

Hatcher said police agencies should have citizen oversight committees and should be required to train officers using experts from outside law enforcement, such as college professors and sociologists.

“Law enforcement is teaching itself. They need people from the outside who can train officers, otherwise they are not solving anything. How can a white police officer train other officers in diversity if he has never been in my shoes?” said Hatcher, who is black.

Oxnard Police Chief Art Lopez, who is working with community representatives to develop an eight-hour ethics and diversity curriculum that will include material on racial profiling, said he agrees with Hatcher, in part, on this issue.

Many classes offered to his department’s officers during advanced training are taught by outside experts, Lopez said.

“I think, to some extent, what [the grand jury] is saying is true,” Lopez said. “You need scenarios, you need open-ended questions and you need people from the community talking to officers and sharing their stories and teaching them.”