During the summer of 2011, then-19-year-old Ivan Richiez was robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped by two men in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Bruised and bloodied, Ivan walked home passed the local Boston Police Department (BPD) precinct. He thought about stopping to ask for help. But then he remembered the more than two dozen times police had stopped or frisked him since 2007, even though he hadn’t been doing anything wrong.
He kept walking.
For years, Boston’s communities of color have reported that police target them for police-civilian encounters, including stops and frisks. They have not been crying wolf.
Today, the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts have released a report, “Black, Brown and Targeted,” that describes powerful new evidence of racially biased policing in Boston. A police-appointed researcher conducted a preliminary analysis of more than 200,000 reports of police-civilian encounters from 2007-2010. The analysis provides evidence that BPD engaged in racially biased “stop and frisk” practices in the following ways:
- While blacks make up only 23 percent of Boston’s population, they made up 63 percent of police encounters from 2007-2010.
- The racial composition of Boston neighborhoods drove the number of police encounters from 2007-2010, even after controlling for crime rates and other factors. In other words, separate and apart from targeting locations of crime, BPD targeted neighborhoods with black residents simply because black people lived there.
- Blacks were significantly more likely than whites to experience the escalation of an encounter to a frisk or search from 2007-2010 even after controlling for crime-related factors, like the civilian’s alleged gang involvement or history of prior arrest.
- Not a single one of the 200,000 police encounters from 2007-2010 that researchers studied led to an arrest.
The bottom line: BPD targeted both black neighborhoods and black people disproportionately for police encounters in ways that are not explained by efforts to target crime.
This is powerful evidence of racially biased policing. And it presents Boston with a powerful opportunity.
Armed with this information, Boston can acknowledge its history of racially biased policing. It can show that the problem is not intractable. It can serve as a leader nationwide in adopting reforms to root it out.
In other words, Boston can be the leader that Ferguson was not.
Before the tragic killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in August 2014, Ferguson already had evidence of racially biased policing. The Missouri attorney general had published data showing that although Ferguson police were twice as likely to search blacks than whites after initiating a stop, whites were far more likely to be found with contraband. That meant police were targeting blacks for stops and searches, but getting it wrong more often than they were for whites. But the police did not reform.
We urge Mayor Marty Walsh and Police Commissioner William Evans to take a bolder and better path than Ferguson. They should tackle Boston’s racially biased policing problem with a focus on accountability, constitutionality, and transparency.
- Accountability: The Boston police should adopt a policy requiring all officers who engage in any police-civilian encounters to wear and use body-worn cameras during every interaction with the public. It should also provide documentation—i.e., a receipt—to any civilian involved in a stop, frisk, and search, even if purportedly consensual.
- Constitutionality: BPD should adopt department-level training on implicit bias and supervision to identify and correct racial bias. This will help ensure respect for the right to equal protection under the law.
- Transparency: BPD should publish on a quarterly basis electronic data on all police-civilian encounters, including demographic information and the officer’s basis for the encounter and action. Openness will rebuild badly damaged public trust, permit researchers to continually test data for evidence of racial bias, and help identify solutions.
Boston has all the information in needs to choose the right path. The time is now.
Visit our website for more information on the ACLU’s work to end racial profiling.
Did anyone note the Charlie Banker, Independent Thinker, on the Bluemass web site? Even Bluemass supports Charlie Baker? We should have gone Grossman.
The ads are generated based on content, but with no notion of context. This diary is not about the gubernatorial race. At least others who have been accused of trolling have been on topic. I recommend this user be banned.
These are Google ads. We don’t control, or have any advance knowledge of, their content. As Christopher correctly points out, Charlie Baker ads show up here because people talk about him and about subjects related to him. Don’t get worked up.
It’s ‘past’ not ‘passed’.
And “Not a single one of the 200,000 police encounters from 2007-2010 that researchers studied led to an arrest,” isn’t the same as “More than 200,000 encounters led to no arrest,” especially since 5000+ encounters discovered what you call “contraband” while BPD calls it “guns and drugs”?
“The analysis provides evidence that BPD engaged in racially biased “stop and frisk” practices” – how many of the “encounters included “frisking”?
Why no break down of the cop’s race? How often was it a black cop “encountering” a black person?
How many of these “encounters” were multiples of the same person. or gang members in high crime areas?
Why no data since 2010? Did it really take 4 years for you to compose a press release?
1. I think the post was supposed to read “More than 200,000 encounters led to no arrest.” The report makes it seem like they have data on more than just those 200,000. The “contraband” figure seems to be a subset of all encounters reviewed.
I am not sure what, exactly, that statistic means– surely competent policing must require some degree of “false positives” in order to reduce the rate of “false negatives.” That said, I don’t know where the distinction between good and bad rates is.
They probably don’t know how many of the encounters involved frisking because (1) the standard report of reason for stop is lousy; and (2) the data is not collected by BPD in a user friendly form, and so it is now technically difficult to actually get the data.
It doesn’t seem like they have access to data about the officers’ race. They would have to cross-reference to personnell databases, which are probably exempt from FOIA requests.
In their defense, their report is based on what BPD gave them, and that was 2007-2010, and it sounds like a lot of that came only recently.
But, on the other hand, the headlines and tone of the report are very conclusory, given that they still don’t have all of the data. The big headline finding is that encounters with people of color comprise 63% of the police encounters, even though people of color are only 24% of the population. That strikes me as a misleading and inflammatory use of numbers, because we expect police to do police things in neighborhoods most in need of policing, right?
So I went and read the report to see how they controlled for “crime rates and other factors.” I was expecting to see this done with statistics, but unfortunately the report is short on analysis and long on conclusions. There isn’t really any description of how this was done at all– just a statement that they did several analyses. That seems to be a problem, no?
It seems like quite a few of the encounters–again no numbers– were multiples of the same person, and that blacks were more likely than whites to have multiple encounters. They say they controlled for prior criminal activity and gang membership, but don’t say how. They conclude that, for African Americans, being subject to one “encounter” increases the risk of a second. But that strikes me as a potential confusion of correlation with causation. I can’t tell from the report.
The BPD wanted to charge the ACLU-M $112K to release the information. The ACLU and the BPD reached a settlement in which the BPD appointed a Rutgers professor to do the research. Meaning a guy with a day job in New Jersey. And it’s taken him this long to get this far.
In what way is this relevant? Black cops can harass people of color disproportionately too.
The paper says the researcher hasn’t finished the detailed report yet but that, after controlling for other factors, black civilians were more likely to be searched, not just stopped. Even a gratuitous racially based stop with no frisk or search is not without harm in bringing down confidence in the police.
The paper says that FIOFS forms are not completed for people who are arrested. So (and the paper says BPD has conceded this) zero of the interactions recorded on these 204,739 FIOFS forms resulted in arrest. Whatever contraband was found in the piddling 2 percent of stops where anything was found, there was no arrest.