New racial profiling data will help Denver Police
There are three things you should know about an important pilot program that Denver police are launching this month to collect ethnic and racial data on traffic and pedestrian stops.
First, it will understandably rankle many officers who do their level best to enforce laws in a fair and equitable manner. Second, it is long overdue. Third, it will help inform debates about racial profiling but is unlikely to settle them.
In the pilot program, police will fill out a 34-point form after every time they stop a motorist or question a pedestrian, providing ethnic data as well as details on what prompted the stop and the result. You’d be irritated too if you’d just been assigned more time-consuming paperwork.
Still, it can’t be helped. Debates about alleged profiling of minorities by police are futile without data and the lack of it only stimulates sweeping claims of an anecdotal nature. Profiling discussions can be inconclusive even with data, as we shall see, but at least they can proceed from a basis in fact.
“You can’t effectively manage what you’re not measuring,” police watchdog Nick Mitchell — aka the Independent Monitor — told me. “So we’re trying to begin to measure what role, if any, race and ethnicity plays in discretionary police activity.”
Mitchell, who worked with the committee that devised the check list, says the lack of data has made it difficult for his office to respond to allegations of bias in police stops. And yet such claims are “one of the concerns most frequently voiced at community meetings in certain parts of town. The response I am able to give is usually pretty unsatisfactory.”
Mitchell defends the data form Denver adopted as a model of brevity compared to what some cities, such as New York and Chicago, saddle their police with. And he suggests it could be streamlined further depending on feedback from officers in northeast Denver, where the three-month pilot will occur, before wholesale adoption by the department.
Yet as crucial as data might be, don’t expect it to settle entirely the question of whether profiling exists or its extent. Consider the city’s experience with a similar effort at data collection in 2001-2003, under mandate by the state. Police brass in those years and since have generally claimed the findings revealed no significant issues — as did Mayor John Hickenlooper in 2004 — while activists argued the opposite. The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News reported the data indicated blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be searched and arrested in traffic stops than whites — although whites were more likely to get a traffic citation — and more likely to be cited for “nonmoving” infractions, such as a broken tailpipe, missing plate or suspicious activity. The question is whether those disparities are evidence of bias.
Police pointed out that they often don’t know the race of a driver until the car is stopped. For that matter, it’s possible nonmoving violations are partly a function of economic class and that older vehicles attract more scrutiny.
As for pedestrians stops, the Rocky Mountain News reported only minor disparities among ethnic groups in terms of receiving citations, with “the likelihood of arrest almost the same.” However, in 2016 the Denver auditor’s office declared that its belated analysis of the same data found “communities of color were ... over-represented in pedestrian stops” even after controlling “for factors that might explain the disparity” such as crime patterns and the racial makeup of pedestrians. That’s disturbing if true, but of course you can’t indict the department today for data that’s more than 15 years old. Hence the need for up-to-date information.
One of the touchiest aspects in the police-profiling controversy is that crime patterns can vary significantly among ethnic groups. This means you can’t expect data on stops, searches, or arrests necessarily to mirror the ethnic breakdown of the larger population. You have to take other factors into account, as well as the nature of police deployment in high-crime neighborhoods. And you can look elsewhere for clues, too — examining, for example, the rate at which police find contraband on motorists and pedestrians they search.
But apparently even this approach, which was first suggested decades ago by Nobel Prize– winning economist Gary Becker, has its limitations. Writing last year in Slate, Stanford professors Sharad Goel and Cheryl Phillips praised Becker’s test, but added that it “can fail to detect discrimination, when it’s there, and can indicate discrimination when it’s not there ...” For example, when they and their team examined data on police stops from 20 states, they found “searches of Hispanic drivers yield contraband at lower rates than searches of whites, and that searches of black drivers yield contraband at similar rates to searches of whites.” But after a complex statistical adjustment (the description of which, in The Annals of Applied Statistics, flew over my head), they found that both black and Hispanic drivers were often searched on the basis of less evidence than whites.
But then this curveball: “As with all tests of discrimination, there is a limit to what one can conclude from such statistical analysis alone. For example, lower search thresholds for these groups could be the result of nondiscriminatory factors if officers had valid reasons to suspect more serious criminal activity when searching black and Hispanic drivers compared to whites.”
See what I mean about the frustrating nature of these analyses?
Still, better to have suggestive if inconclusive facts than no facts at all so that police can adjust their training and procedures. For that matter, the more experts and non-experts alike seize the opportunity to weigh in with their take on the data, the more legitimate insights are likely to surface. That means the data must be available to all — which Mitchell says is his understanding of the city’s intention.
With any luck, the days of arguing mainly by anecdote regarding racial bias in Denver police stops may be numbered.