State to share police data on profiling

WASHINGTON — Connecticut is the first state to enlist in a nationwide bid to share law enforcement racial profiling data it collects from individual police departments and State Police.

“What I want to see built in the nation is a system that’s not based on perceptions or ideas or bias, but that’s based on reality,” said Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who made the announcement Wednesday at a conference sponsored by the Center for Policing Equity. “Crime goes across borders. Mistakes go across borders. Perceptions go across borders. So why wouldn’t you want to share that information?”

Police racial profiling has been a simmering issue for decades, but it exploded into the open after a 2014 shooting and civil disturbances in Ferguson, Mo., revealed a long pattern of racial profiling and harassment of minorities by police.

Connecticut has been at the forefront of collecting data from police departments and the State Police. But Malloy said the state’s profiling data analysis remains spotty, because only 50 of 107 police departments statewide share it.

Data collection is hit and miss, he said in an interview after giving a speech. Some departments still rely too much on paper.

“Not everybody is on the same level,” he said. Nevertheless, he added, the departments that do participate represent municipalities with more than half of the state’s population.

Isolating instances of racial profiling from routine law enforcement in minority-dominant urban areas is easier said than done.

But Malloy insisted that whatever its imperfections, data collection and dissemination is preferable to guessing and implementing policies based on hunches.

“What we ultimately have to do is create a set of circumstances by which every state wants to share that data, by which every state wants to be measured, by which every state wants to make decisions based on the real truth,” Malloy said. “If we start to do that as a nation, we actually will start to undo some of the damage we’ve done to ourselves.”

He praised the data collection within Connecticut as being instrumental to reduction of crime and the state’s prison population.

And it has also been important in disproving many common assumptions police have about crime and drugs.

For instance, Malloy said, blacks and Hispanics are not more likely to drive under the influence or use heroin. “That’s absolutely

wrong,” he said. “Heroin in America is a white problem.”

Racial profiling in Connecticut has been barred under state law since 1999. But the state is not without its blemishes.

A statistical analysis last year by the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State University identified six municipalities whose police departments “exhibit a statistically significant racial or ethnic disparity.”

They are Berlin, Meriden, Monroe, Newtown, Norwich and Ridgefield.

Among the measures used to separate racial profiling from routine police stops was one known as “veil of darkness” — comparing the ethnicity of drivers in daytime police stops, when color is easily discernible, to those at night when it is not.

In addition, five other departments had problems when data was analyzed in terms of statewide averages, the estimated size of the driving population, and resident-only stops.

Those five were: Wethersfield, East Hartford, Stratford, Darien and Trumbull.

“We’re not afraid to be tested,” Malloy said in his speech. “We want to make our judgments and policies based on reality, as opposed to what we perceive.”

Malloy