Race is still a factor, but …
Study finds encouraging trends among chronic racial disparities in police stops
SAN JOSE — A new data analysis shows people’s race does have a bearing on how often they are stopped by San Jose police, but the disparities are not nearly as stark as what community groups and even police themselves expected.
The study of SJPD traffic and pedestrian stops, conducted by the University of Texas-El Paso’s Center for Law and Human Behavior, released Friday, found that black and Latino motorists are stopped by police at twice the rate of whites in San Jose. But the racial gulf was more muted in other areas, highlighted by the finding that black pedestrians are stopped on the street less frequently than whites.
Michael R. Smith, director of the UTEP center and the principal author of the study, lauded the department for ordering the analysis, which he said typically comes after an agency has been
put under a federal consent decree or is mired in scandal.
“It’s not often a police department, of its own volition, says ‘Here’s our data, tell us what you find,’” Smith said. “We expected to see higher disparities. This is a good news story for San Jose.”
Police Chief Eddie Garcia said the study, ordered in the wake of a 2015 Mercury News analysis that found similar disparities, is proof the department is progressing toward the goal of treating all residents the same way.
“It’s not to say we’re perfect, but we’re on the right track, and we’re not in crisis,” Garcia said. “We have a very professional department. We’re going to learn from the disparities, and we’ll stand tall to them.”
Civil-rights leaders said while they were encouraged by some of the findings of the new study, they challenged elements of the methodology, most notably the exclusion of gang-enforcement data, arguing that such enforcement has given police a wide berth to target Latino citizens for stops.
“I get that they’re not necessarily comparable” to everyday street stops, said Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley De-Bug. “But that’s a major blind spot to us.”
This newspaper’s 2015 analysis compared vehicle and pedestrian stop data — the latter of which SJPD began collecting comprehensively two years earlier, among the first in the country — using the Census as a baseline. The new study, which employed data analysis, department interviews and officer ride-alongs, used the more precise benchmark of culling traffic-collision and assorted crime report data.
The study of over 80,000 reports between 2013 and 2016 also reaffirmed previous analysis that once stopped in their cars, blacks were nearly three times as likely as whites to be ordered to sit on a street curb — an oft-critiqued practice by civil-rights groups — and are nine times more likely than whites to be given a field interview. Latino drivers were more than three times as likely as whites to get a field interview, and both groups were more than twice as likely to get a criminal citation at the end of the stop.
But those groups were no more likely to be arrested than whites, according to the UTEP analysis. And as was determined in this newspaper’s analysis two years ago, blacks and Latinos were about twice as likely as whites to be searched, but either equally or less likely than whites to be actually found with contraband.
There was less of a racial disparity when it came to stopping pedestrians. In fact, black pedestrians were stopped less frequently than white ones, the study found.
In that same category, black and white citizens have the same rate of arrest, search, and citations. Latinos, however, are more than twice as likely as whites to be handcuffed during a stop and three times as likely to get a field interview, but less likely to have a police report written at the end of it.
Asians, who are underrepresented in most of the analyses both by UTEP and this newspaper, are three times as likely to get a field interview than whites, the highest rate shown. But when they are stopped, they are about half as likely to yield a police report.
Walter Katz, San Jose’s independent police auditor, said many of the UTEP study’s findings parallel previous studies, but took note of what he called promising aspects.
“We can draw some positive conclusions that it appears, at the surface, that the department doesn’t have systemic problems, especially when compared to some other departments elsewhere,” he said. “But there are still really important questions to ask.”
Katz said that includes the gap between stops and actual arrests: “A lot of the complaints we get are not from people who were arrested, but by people who are stopped and not arrested.”
Smith noted an officer’s race did not significantly affect the outcomes of the police encounters they studied. The city’s police force is about 54 percent white, 23 percent Latino, 4 percent black and more than 15 percent Asian.
The researchers recommended a more granular analysis, at the individual officer level, to get into the causes behind the disparities, which Garcia endorsed.
Garcia said before the study was commissioned, he ordered his department to implement comprehensive training aimed at fair and impartial policing, procedural justice, and crisis intervention for mentally ill subjects.
“We didn’t wait for this study to come out to know this is where we needed to be going,” he said.
Katz also called attention to a report by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office titled “Race and Prosecutions” published last fall that found racial disparities in the proportions of blacks and Latinos being charged with misdemeanors and felonies, particularly for resisting arrest. Given that a plurality of arrests in the county are made in San Jose, he says some reconciliation has to be made between those disparate charging figures and the relatively even arrest findings found by the UTEP study.
“Those can’t both be true,” Katz said.
He also echoed Jayadev’s concern that gangenforcement stops by the department’s Violent Crimes Enforcement Team were left out of the analysis. The study excluded these cases because targeted enforcement of gangs is not the general purview of street cops who account for the majority of encounters with citizens.
“That’s troubling because some of the complaints we get are a variation of ‘I’m being stopped because they think I’m gang member because I’m Hispanic,’” Katz said. “The ethnicity is the decision maker for the stop.”
Garcia said he backed the methodology, but said he was open to further inquiry on the topic.
“We’re in a city where 90 percent of gang issues are Latino-gang related,” he said. “If we want to do a study of disparities of VCET, we can but we need to make sure it’s apples to apples.”
Garcia asserts the study is an important benchmark and should be lauded as a tribute to his officers outperforming expectations and peer cities.
“We need to give credit to these officers, who are responsible for any of the positive outcomes that came out of this,” he said.
Jayadev agreed that the study gives the community a baseline to measure progress. But he added it must be coupled with a constant push to reduce police shootings and use of force, which he said can undo a lot of that hard-earned progress with the posting of a single viral video.
“This is talking about police and community relations at a certain altitude,” he said. “What it doesn’t really capture is the experience of a wrongful arrest and how lasting and deep that injury is.”