Claims of racism attempt to divide

Along with our courts and legislatures, our police are one of the pillars which support our most fundamental human rights. It is very unfortunate that, like much else these days, the police have been dragged into the net of showcase legislation and dirty politics which have infected our local community.

Sean Goldrick, a former member of the Greenwich Board of Estimate and Taxation and Democratic Town Committee, has written no less than nine letters to Greenwich Free Press since June. He’s been wrong about much of what he’s written.

But Mr. Goldrick isn’t just wrong. He regularly draws false equivalences to support his ugly claims of racism against opposition candidates. He equated immigration detention centers to Nazi concentration camps when attacking former Greenwich Republican Town Committee Chair Rich DiPreta, and now he claims any opposition to the “Police Accountability Act” is racist in his attack against Republican candidates Ryan Fazio, Kimberly Fiorello, Harry Arora and Joe Kelly.

This act itself is an example of political showmanship at its worst, and it has many shortcomings, including its reliance on “implicit bias training” which is ineffective and counterproductive.

In support of his accusations of racism, Mr. Goldrick, is fond of quoting organizations such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, which the U.S. said “makes a mockery of human rights,” and now the American Civil Liberties Union, which has lately decided that “Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer”

Mr. Goldrick misrepresents the findings of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Study by cherry picking data implying that as many as 29 police departments in the state were marred by racist attitudes.

But if you read the 2018 report, it concluded that only one department had a potential problem, and this department, was responsible for less than 1 percent of consent searches in the state, and has a much higher than average overall percentage of effective searches in which contraband was found.

When it comes to those 29 departments with a high percentage of minority stops, Mr. Goldrick omits that this was before accounting for local demographics.

Mr. Goldrick also ignores the “Veil of Darkness” test, which compares daytime police stops to nighttime stops when an officer cannot determine the race of the driver before the stop. To quote the study, “The results from the Veil of Darkness analysis” ... “found no disparity in over-all state-wide stops.”

Mr. Goldrick also fails to mention that the Connecticut Racial Profiling report does not recommend eliminating consent searches as a police tool, and neither did the ACLU, which in their testimony advocated for reducing police encounters (i.e. stops, not searches). And the report itself has many shortcomings, including lacking information on and consideration of the race and ethnicity of the police officers making the stop.

While quoting numbers without meaning, Mr. Goldrick also omits that statistical disparities are a prerequisite but are not themselves sufficient to establish the existence of racial bias. For example: in 2018, men comprised 63 percent of all traffic stops in Connecticut, while being 49 percent of the population. Clearly this statistic on its own does not indicate gender bias among police.

Racism exists and it may be endemic to some police departments, and where it is, we should root it out. But it is also a problem that many, like Mr. Goldrick, have taken to shouting “racism!” at every opportunity as a way of diverting and distracting from the terrible job they have done solving our problems. They use claims of “racism” to silence political opponents, and to push showcase policies that are detrimental to our state and detrimental to people of all races, genders and orientations.

I hope our voters are aware that these accusations of racism are the dirtiest of politics. I trust that voters will remember that the police play a vital role in protecting our basic human rights whatever our race, economic status, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. I am confident that voters realize that some are willing to cherry-pick statistics and use the police as scapegoats in their game of dirty politics.

I also hope that the Greenwich Democratic Town Committee will try to distance themselves from Mr. Goldrick and his friends on the extreme left who engage in this game of dirty politics in their attempt to hang on to power by shifting the blame for their failed social and economic policies to the police.