No racial bias in police action, chief tells forum
The city police chief says his officers don’t issue tickets or make arrests based on a subject’s race, and he tried at a forum to assure a skeptical segment of the community that empathy is part of an officer’s job.
At the forum Monday evening in New Progressive Baptist Church — the ninth such meeting — Chief Egidio Tinti said, “We’re not talking about 40 years ago. These officers understand that their actions are judged not only by ... the administration of the city, not just the police department, but by the community itself . ... That attitude of [thinking] ‘You’re black, you’re getting a ticket’ doesn’t exist today. That’s not how it works.”
City resident Steven Spicer, however, said there still needs to be change in how police “perceive attitudes of people of color and also how people of color address police” during interactions.
“Because I’m older, I know how to put that smile on my face and say, ‘Good evening, officer,’” he said.
Tinti was adamant in his remarks to the roughly 30 people in attendance that interactions between police and community members are based on incidents, not skin color.
“It’s not the driver we’re looking at on the traffic stop,” he said. “We don’t look at the driver and go, ‘We’re going to pull him over.’ We’re looking at the vehicle . ... If the tail light’s out, doesn’t [use] the signal, goes through the stop sign, we’re stopping the car and, most likely, issuing a warning or a traffic citation to the driver . ...
“Every car that gets pulled over has to have probable cause for that stop to happen,” the chief said. “We’re not looking at the driver [or] the ethnicity. We’re not looking at any of that. We’re looking at the violation by that driver that’s causing that officer to stop that car.”
Among the efforts being made to measure and adjust city police practices is a data-collection system that could include cameras and microphones carried by officers, Tinti said.
“We’re still in the phase of rolling out our Impact software program, our records management system,” he said. “This is by far the greatest technological step we’ve taken in years . ... The system itself will allow us to collect lots of information ... digitizing all the information for us. It take all the information that the state requires for its standardized incident reports ... and it basically puts it in catalog form.”
Several people at the forum responded that a data-collection system doesn’t account for “people of color and young black men” having a greater chance of interactions with police resulting in tickets or arrests.
Mayor Steve Noble said the use of recording devices will keep officers from acting improperly.
“Our supervisors on the street that are out there with [police officers] do ... random checks at the end of every shift and actually listen in to calls, just randomly,” he said, adding that “if somebody makes a complaint, we can go to the tape.”
The Rev. James Childs, a Kingston school board members, said such information about police interactions with the public could be used to identify whether there are racial and cultural biases among some officers.
“Unless we use that data to look at who’s arrested, how many are arrested ... we don’t know if there’s a problem with the disproportionality of the arrests,” he said.
“If the data’s being collected ... we can look at the data that surrounds [officers’] activities and, therefore, either prove them to be not guilty of anything, or we can show whether they are,” Childs said.
Some residents at the forum were not convinced city officials understand the depth of bias that can exist among police.
“I like the answers that everybody is giving, like there’s no racial bias, everybody’s happy-go-lucky, but if we are to be honest, we live in a culturally conditioned society,” Rita Worthingon said.
“We have been taught and conditioned to look at people differently based on their race, based on the way that they’re dressed,” she said to Tinti. “So I know that we’re painting this rosy picture, but, unfortunately, it’s not always true, chief. It’s not. So I think that we have to have an honest conversation about what is going on in our society today.”