Law enforcement leaders miss the point in their responses to U-T’s racial disparities project
Leaders in local law enforcement Friday responded to the UnionTribune’s project on racial disparities in policing by reaffirming why so many in the community distrust law enforcement; they also missed the larger underlying issue reflected in the project.
The responses came from San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit, and David Leonhardi, president of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of San Diego County, in the U-T’s opinion section, which is separate from the newsroom and myself.
Gore penned a four-paragraph reply, saying the department had entered into a contract with the Center for Policing Equity to independently review the data, so it would be premature for the department to comment on the project’s findings.
Nisleit wrote a lengthier response about some operational changes his department has made in an attempt to address disparities, and he focused a chunk of his piece on what he sees as the impact external factors — those being outside of law enforcement — have on disparity data. He contends that disparity in policing “does not necessarily mean that bias, racism and discrimination” are present. He seems to argue that other factors that disproportionately afflict communities of color — such as poverty, crime, homelessness and access to health care — are more responsible for disparate policing outcomes.
Leonhardi similarly wrote about external factors but also argued that there are flaws in the data, and it doesn’t actually support “claims of racial bias” among deputies. He suggested that police stop data relies on an officer’s perception of a person’s race, but the U-T’s analysis compared police interactions with overall population demographics, including self-reported census data. Essentially he argued that deputies are likely overcounting the number of Black people they stop because they are perceiving people as Black who are not identifying as Black; he offered multiracial
people as his prime example of people who may be misidentified.
He also argued that census data doesn’t account for military service personnel and tourists, therefore the population of Blacks is undercounted in the county and a disparity in policing involving Blacks doesn’t actually exist.
The claim that external factors contribute to the disparities we see in policing is not entirely meritless. The U-T’s reporters acknowledged some external factors in their stories and quoted an SDPD official who cited homelessness, mental illness and criminal activity as contributing factors to how police do their jobs in some neighborhoods. However, the influence of external factors doesn’t prove that other factors — like bias, racism and discrimination — are not also at play.
Leonhardi’s contention about census data, on the other hand, is more complex.
A Pew Research poll in 2015 found that 61 percent of people with a background that includes more than one race do not identify as multiracial, so it’s unlikely those same people would be selfreporting
as something they don’t identify with.
Multiracial is also such a large umbrella term that it goes beyond people who have any connection to being Black — such as someone whose parents are, say, Asian and Latino, or White and Latino — so I have a hard time believing that multiracial people who do not identify as Black
make up a significant enough number in the dataset of police encounters to account for disparities we see in deputies interacting with Blacks and Native Americans, in particular.
Leonhardi’s statement about the census not accounting for active service personnel may be a fair critique, because the census bureau last year began
counting people based on their base of deployment rather than their address during enlistment,and minority representation varies across military branches. So while Blacks may be overrepresented in the Navy, they are significantly underrepresented in the Marine Corps.
The bottom line is the police stop data and the census data are imperfect; no one is disputing that. But it is the best we can get.
And it’s worth remembering that the findings of the U-T’s project are not outliers. There have been other studies that reflect disparities in local policing.
There is a larger issue here that Nisleit and Leonhardi fail to grasp. For many of us, Black people especially, we have personal experiences of seeing law enforcement behave with hostility, violence or in some other inappropriate way toward us or someone close to us.
In a poll conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2017, 60 percent of Black Americans said they or a family member had been stopped or treated unfairly by police because they are Black.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll last year found that 21 percent of Black Americans reported being victims of police violence. In contrast, only 3 percent of White Americans say the same.
When a July 2020 Gallup poll asked people to describe their experience interacting with police over the prior year, 59 percent of Black respondents described the interaction as positive, compared with 79 percent of
White respondents.
The point is that this isn’t about Derek Chauvin, “a few bad apples” or even disparity data. It’s about a long history of police targeting minorities.
You will never build trust with Black people or communities of color if you continue to try to downplay and dismiss racism and bias as parts of the problem in policing.
Bias may not be the entirety of it, but it is damn sure part of it. The onus isn’t on Black people and other people of color to get over our fear of police; we are not the ones primarily responsible for breaking that trust.
Everyone who works in law enforcement chose to take a job in public service. That means you bear some responsibility for making sure the public feels safe, especially around your fellow officers and deputies.
So stop deflecting, stop lamenting about being scrutinized, and stop complaining about disparity data. Instead, actually listen when we tell you what we need you to do to make us feel safer.
Because if you don’t, well, there’s a reason so many of us see that badge and we perceive a threat rather than a hero.