POLICE POWER OUT OF BALANCE
Republic analysis of 10 years of records proves officers use more force against people of color — by any measure
Phoenix police over the past 10 years have used force against Black, Native American and Latino residents at higher rates than against the city’s white residents, and officers have resorted to force more often in majority Black or Hispanic neighborhoods.
In 2019, officers used force five times as often against Black and Native residents of the city. Racial disparities in policing have long been cited in calls to reform the agency, but until now the disparities in overall use of force have not been measured, by either the Police Department or the public.
Police have met demands for reform by activists from communities of color with vows to listen, adjust policy and be “self-reflective.” “What Phoenix police has is a culture where we’ve been selfreflective, where we’re willing to look at training methods, we’re willing to engage with community and the public,” Phoenix police Chief Jeri Williams told The Arizona Republic in 2019.
Yet Phoenix police have not reflected on the use-of-force records they keep.
The Republic obtained and analyzed 10 years of those records, revealing a wide disparity between officers’ use of force against communities of color and the city’s white residents.
An assistant Phoenix police chief could not explain the disparities because he was not aware of them until The Republic shared its findings.
A spokeswoman for the agency said that while the department may be unable to explain the disparities, it strives to treat people fairly.
“Our focus is to make sure that we treat everyone with dignity and respect,” said Sgt. Mercedes Fortune.
Phoenix police began releasing the data to The Republic in June, after refusing to do so for a year. It came as protests against law enforcement swept the nation in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Accurately documenting officers’ use of force helps ensure it’s done within department policy that prescribes circumstances under which officers can resort to force. It also enables the agency, the public and researchers to evaluate whether officers have exercised their authority fairly.
Many departments throughout the country, including Minneapolis police, regularly disclose their use of force to the public. Minneapolis police post upto-date reports on the city’s website.
The Phoenix Police Department has been encouraged to do the same. The National Police Foundation — which last year was asked to independently study the agency’s record year of police shootings in 2018 and make recommendations for improvement — urged the department to publish at least 10 years of its use-of-force data.
But Phoenix hasn’t done so, partly because it admits the data it keeps is incomplete. Officers have neglected to properly document their use of force so often that the department contends the data misrepresents how often police actually used force during some years.
“We don’t want to give the false impression that use-of-force numbers went down ... and then went back up,” Dan Wilson, a police spokesman, said regarding officers’ failure to report scores of incidents from 2015 through mid-2019.
In addition to missing reports, The Republic found that prior to 2015, more often than not, officers who did report using force neglected to describe the manner of force used, such as hand strikes, kicks or choke holds. The officers instead left that part of their report blank, according to the data.
While this appears to be the first time Phoenix police have revealed publicly the agency’s broad use of force, the data, because of its flaws, doesn’t accurately depict all instances in which officers resorted to harmful actions in the course of their work.
“That’s just unacceptable in my view,” said Jared Keenan, a criminal justice attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. “It’s also unacceptable to say, ‘We can’t give you data because it’s unreliable and it’s unreliable because our department is not keeping track of it reliably.’”
More force against Black, Latino, Native residents
Phoenix and other cities have been pressed to reexamine the role of policing, as they confront a renewed focus on systemic racism in the nation’s criminal justice institutions, a movement that intensified after Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.
“Quite frankly, we’re not tone deaf,” said Phoenix police Assistant Chief Steve Martos. “We hear what is occurring out in the community, we see what is happening nationally.”
In the community, advocates for police reform argue, as they have for years, that police in Phoenix disproportionately use force against people of color. The department’s own data confirms this.
During 2019, Phoenix police reported using force 1,244 times. As a group, Latinos were most often on the receiving end of that force, even though they were arrested at about the same rate as whites and represent a similar share of the city’s population as whites.
Black people were even more disproportionately subjected to police force. Black people make up just 7% of the city’s population, but were the subject of about 19% of police force.
Native Americans, too, were subjected to a much larger share of police force than their share of the city’s population.
White people, meanwhile, were dramatically underrepresented. About 43% of the city’s population is white, yet just 25% of the subjects of force were white.
About 66% of the time, officers who reported using force were white.
Much of that police force took place in neighborhoods with larger populations of Hispanic or Black residents, particularly in the southern and western parts of the city, including south Phoenix and Maryvale.
Take 19-year-old Dion Humphrey, who was the subject of police force on the morning of Jan. 10, after walking his younger sisters to school in south Phoenix.
Officers approached him near Seventh and Southern avenues, as he was returning home. They threw a flashbang, shot him with a rubber bullet and tackled him. He was arrested and later hospitalized, but never charged with a crime.
Officers had confused Humphrey with his older half-brother, whom police were seeking in connection with an armed robbery the night before.
Humphrey and his half-brother are Black. Officer Raymond J. Meschnark IV, the only officer who reported using force on Humphrey, is white.
In June, Humphrey filed a $10 million claim against Phoenix and the officers.
State Sen. Martín Quezada lives in Maryvale, another neighborhood where The Republic analysis shows officers use force more frequently than in majority white areas. He said Black and Latino families in the area fear police, and for good reason. He’s heard many accounts of police interactions with people of color turning violent, even deadly.
“The reality is that there is a completely different experience for a man or woman of color living in Maryvale or south Phoenix to come into even a normal interaction with law enforcement … than for someone white living in Ahwatukee or Paradise Valley,” he said.
“I’ve lived it. I’ve even experienced it — that fear that goes through your heart and soul when you see the flashing lights in your rear view mirror … One step and you could lose your life.”
Some use of force not reported
When an officer uses force during an arrest, department policy requires that two reports be completed: an incident report and a use-of-force report.
Police fill out the reports using their laptops. Information from use-of-force reports is recorded in the department’s electronic reporting system. But if an officer doesn’t file a report, nothing is recorded.
Between October 2015 and August 2019, Phoenix police officers routinely failed to complete use-of-force reports, leading to an undercount of how frequently force was used by the department.
The agency largely blames its transition to a new records management system for the missing data.
There were significant glitches in the rollout of the new RMS in 2015, but most of the problems were resolved by the end of that year. Plus, the newer system is easier for officers to use.
“As a sergeant at the time, I thought, ‘Man, data entry into the system is super easy,’” said Sgt. Fortune, describing her first impressions of the RMS. “It’s super friendly, you go in there and write a report.”
Despite the upgraded, more userfriendly reporting system, officers’ reporting of force declined.
In 2018, during Phoenix police’s record year for officer shootings, many officers who fired their weapons didn’t complete use-of-force reports, said Wilson, the department spokesman. That means those incidents are not included in the department’s use-of-force statistics.
While overall declines in reporting due to officers’ failure to properly fill out reports began with the implementation of the new RMS, some aspects of data collection improved. Prior to 2015, 52% of the reports included no information detailing the type of force used by officers. By 2019, nearly every report included that information.
The department can discipline officers or sergeants who fail to complete use-of-force reports. But it appears that rarely happened.
A Republic examination of police discipline last year found over an eightyear period just 10 officers were disciplined for failing to complete the reports.
When two officers tackled AaRone Fowler to the ground in a March 2019 incident near downtown Phoenix, their use of force wasn’t recorded. The department learned of it from a complaint, not the officers.
The officers were attempting to detain Fowler, who is Black, because they suspected the vehicle he was sitting in while waiting for a friend was stolen. The car actually belonged to Fowler. Afterward, Fowler shared pictures of himself on social media showing a busted lip, torn clothes and bruises and scrapes on his face and shoulders.
When officers tackle a suspect to the ground, department policy requires that the tactic be explained in a use-of-force report. The officers who Fowler alleged tackled him do not appear to have reported it.
An internal investigation concluded the officers committed no wrongdoing but the department’s reasoning is unclear.
“I’ve never fully recovered with the mental aspect,” Fowler told The Republic. “Especially when they concluded there was no wrongdoing on the part of the officers.”
In February, Fowler filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the officers.
Assistant Chief Martos serves as commander of the agency’s Professional Standards Bureau, which handles internal investigations into allegations of police misconduct. Asked by The Republic why the use of force against Fowler hadn’t been reported by the officers, he said taking a suspect to the ground doesn’t qualify as a reportable use-offorce tactic.
“If you are taken to the ground, that is not an application of force,” Martos said. “That is not something we would require a supervisor to look into, to report or do an investigation on.”
Department policy, however, says “tripping” and “tackling” should be reported as force.
Martos also leads the department’s Public Affairs Bureau, which maintains control over the information Phoenix police provide to the public.
“We as a department maybe need to do better as to educating the community about what defines an application of force,” he said.
The agency insisted — without providing evidence — that even when officers failed to report they had used force, supervisors were still informed of the incidents and were able to determine whether officers had acted according to department policy.
Assistant Chief Martos said the department sometimes finds out about unreported incidents when it receives complaints from the public. But he said those cases are rare.
‘You have to be transparent’
In 2018, Phoenix police recognized the agency was on pace to be a record year for officer shootings. The department wanted an independent review of the situation and hired the National Police Foundation, which researches ways to improve policing, to produce it.
Criminal justice researchers at universities nationwide participated in the Phoenix study, which primarily involved examining the record number of shootings that year. But researchers also examined officers’ use of force.
Among the researchers’ recommendations to improve the department: regularly publish its use-of-force data online. The recommendation was intended to improve transparency.
The department has yet to do that and instead maintained a tight grip on its use-of-force data, refusing to release it to the public and denying The Republic’s public-records requests for the data for more than a year.
Wilson said the department is still working to implement the study’s recommendation on use-of-force data. It’s not clear when that will occur.
Justin Nix, who worked on the Phoenix study for the National Police Foundation, called the department’s response “disappointing.”
“We released (the study) in April 2019, and if I recall Chief Williams shortly thereafter put together a plan to implement all of the recommendations,” said Nix, who is an associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “Fifteen months later ... you’re still having trouble getting open records requests (for use of force)?”
“You have to be transparent with your community. And if you can’t, then how can the community hold them accountable if they’re not doing that, and if they pledge to do that?”
Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who studies police violence for Campaign Zero, said nothing will change without community pressure and political will to overhaul policing.
“We’ve seen some of the officers who committed these egregious acts get fired and charged, but we have not seen a change in the overall outcomes,” Sinyangwe said. “That’s because these structural elements that prevent the vast majority of officers who commit misconduct from being held accountable, those structures still exist — they’re in the law, they’re in the contract, they’re in department policy … and that will remain in effect until the city and state change it.”
It requires the combined efforts of community organizers, researchers and elected officials to pressure police departments to change those policies.
“What I’m hopeful about is that now we’re in a moment it seems like cities are a little bit more receptive,” Sinyangwe said. “I think that there is this window to change those structural systemic factors so that police violence can actually be addressed.”
At a recent news conference in response to Phoenix police’s July 4 fatal shooting of Maryvale resident James Garcia, lawmakers and activists joined Garcia’s family in calling on Williams and Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego to hold accountable abusive officers and allow an independent review of systemic racism and excessive force within the department.
Garcia was inside a parked vehicle in the driveway of a friend’s house when he was shot by two police officers.
“We need to make sure that every part of our community feels as safe and as protected as every other part of our community,” state Rep. Diego Rodriguez, D-Laveen, who is a former prosecutor, said at the news conference outside Phoenix police headquarters.
“Let’s take a look at why law enforcement uses violence, even lethal force to compel compliance,” Rodriguez added. “We will not solve this problem until we confront that problem head on, root it out and eliminate it.”