San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Reporters discuss collecting, analyzing data on racial disparities in San Diego law enforcement.
The three-part series, “The Color of Authority,” brought into focus racial disparities that have plagued policing in San Diego County for decades. The final installment published today.
Here, U-T Watchdog reporters Lyndsay Winkley and Lauryn Schroeder reflect on the project, including how they got started and challenges they faced.
Q:
Why did you decide to investigate the topic of racial disparities in policing?
A:
This whole series started off as a much simpler story. Last year, the San Diego County Sheriff ’s Department put out a report that summarized its traffic stop data and included a statistical test called the Veil of Darkness.
The test is designed to zero in on racial bias in policing by determining whether officers and deputies pull over certain racial groups more often during the day, when race is presumably easier to see, than at night.
The problem is, the Sheriff ’s Department did the test completely wrong. The Union-tribune wrote about the error, and department officials pledged to re-do their report, but they never did. So we decided to conduct the test ourselves.
However, after taking a look a closer look at the data, we found so many racial disparities that we decided to expand the story into a series.
Q:
Why did you feel it was important to explore those disparities in more depth?
A:
Across the nation, not just in San Diego County, communities are having vital discussions about racial injustices within policing. In order to have that conversation honestly, we need to have a deeper understanding of the types of racial disparities that exist here at home. We attempted to provide that kind of understanding in this series.
We also thought it was important to emphasize that these inequities have persisted for a very long time — a fact that simultaneously suggests that they are difficult to address and that we as a society are not doing enough to change things.
Q:
Were people surprised by your findings and what sort of questions have you gotten?
A:
No one we spoke to was surprised by our findings, which really speaks to the pervasive nature of these disparities. It’s also worth noting that the disparities we see here are very similar to those seen across the state and country.
One question that comes up pretty frequently is why we don’t address crime statistics more deeply in our stories. People have pointed out that certain racial groups are also overrepresented in violent crime statistics, a fact that could account for the greater number of contacts with police.
However, most of the 500,000plus stops we looked at were not made because a violent crime was committed or was being investigated. Most of the stops were related to traffic violations. It’s also important to note that the vast majority of people of all races will never commit a violent crime, so the tendencies of those who do are hardly representative of an entire racial group.
Q:
What were some of the challenges you faced?
A:
The stop data itself is very complex and organized in a way that required significant manipulation before an analysis could even take place. We spent several weeks cleaning and analyzing the data before we could even begin the reporting process.
Helping people understand the impact of these disparities was also a challenge. There are many statistics in this series, but all those numbers reflect real-life experiences. We were grateful that people were willing to share their experiences with police — to help the public understand how traumatic police interactions can sometimes be. We did our very best to handle those stories with care, in a way that wouldn’t retraumatize those we worked with.
Q:
Were there any interesting findings that didn’t make it into the story?
The data set was massive, so there were several statistics that were not included in the final reports. These included age-related findings, as well as arrest and citation rates.
We also planned to look at stops involving people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community, but we ultimately decided to focus our efforts on racial disparities specifically.