A CRASH COURSE IN RACIAL DISPARITIES
Blacks die during police chases at rates higher than others
FLINT, MICH. James Thompson was the first to die.
The 75- year- old Navy veteran had just taken four neighborhood boys for haircuts when an SUV whose driver was fleeing the police smashed into his car with such force that the impact ruptured his brain.
Four months later, two Michigan troopers chased a driver through Flint at more than 120 mph until he broadsided a car and killed a 42- year- old nursing assistant.
The next month, when a driver without a seat belt wouldn’t pull over, a Michigan trooper chased him, ran a red light and killed a grandmother coming home from a beauty shop.
The month after that, a speeding motorcyclist fleeing a trooper, hit an oncoming car and died.
All four chases happened in 2014, all within 4 miles of one another. And all shared one other characteristic: Everyone killed was black.
The spate of fatal pursuits in Flint is perhaps the most extraordinary illustration of a long- standing, deadly and, until now, overlooked inequality in U. S. policing.
A first- of- its- kind investigation by USA TODAY shows that black people across the nation — both innocent by-
standers and those fleeing the police — have been killed in police chases at a rate nearly three times higher than everyone else.
USA TODAY examined federal records for 5,300 fatal pursuits since 1999, when the government started tracking the races of people killed in car crashes. USA TODAY also took a deeper look at 702 chases in 2013 and 2014, reviewing thousands of pages of police documents and hours of video of pursuits across the nation.
Among the findings:
Blacks have been killed at a disproportionate rate in pursuits every year since 1999. On average, 90 black people were killed each year in police chases, nearly double what would be expected based on their percentage of the population.
Deadly pursuits of black drivers were twice as likely to start over minor offenses or non- violent crimes. In 2013 and 2014, nearly every deadly pursuit triggered by an illegally tinted window, a seat- belt violation or the smell of marijuana involved a black driver.
Black people were more likely than whites to be chased in more crowded urban areas, during peak traffic hours and with passengers in their cars, all factors that can increase the danger to innocent bystanders. Chases of black motorists were about 70% more likely to wind up killing a bystander.
USA TODAY’s findings come amid remarkable national tumult over police tactics that increasingly are seen as targeting minorities.
Deadly encounters over the past two years between officers and black men sparked unrest from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore and Charlotte, and raised difficult questions about why black people are stopped, searched, arrested and shot by the police at higher rates than others.
Pursuits are among the most dangerous police activities.
They have killed more than 6,200 people since 1999. Black people make up 13% of the U. S. population, but are 28% of those killed in pursuits whose race was known.
The racially lopsided death toll mirrors almost exactly the disparity in po- lice shooting deaths. Yet police chases have remained largely unexplored even as the Justice Department moves to track more carefully other types of deadly interactions with the police.
USA TODAY asked 11 of the nation’s leading researchers on race and policing to review its analysis. Each said the findings demand additional scrutiny because they raise the prospect that race affects one of the most lethal police activities.
“This is not giving someone a traffic ticket. This is people dying,” said Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice. “The cost of having small disparities is huge because you’re ending up with loss of life.”
Police officials, including those from the Michigan State Police, said a sus- pect’s race has no impact on officers’ decision to pursue.
Instead, they suggested that any disparity was likely a byproduct of police spending more time in high- crime neighborhoods.
Michigan’s state police were sent to Flint in 2012 with orders to crack down on minor offenses in a city grappling with rising crime and a shrinking police force. There and elsewhere, officials said officers chase only those who run.
“The decision to flee from police is a choice made by the driver, not the officer,” Michigan State Police spokeswoman Shannon Banner said.
Still, courts and some law enforcement agencies have said police bear some responsibility for the danger because their decisions to begin or continue a chase can escalate the risk.
And critics fear police are more willing to take that risk in black neighborhoods.
“It’s an issue of institutionalized racism, that communities of color are not valued as much as communities not of color,” said Michigan state Rep. Sheldon Neeley, a Democrat from Flint.
Margo Thompson, who lost her husband of 45 years in one of the Flint chases, blames both men who were speeding that day — the trooper and the man he was chasing.
“They took away my heart, my love,” Thompson said as she sat in the small
retirement- community apartment where she now lives by herself.
Figuring out why the death toll falls so heavily on black people is nearly impossible because states and the federal government do so little to track chases or the people they killed during them.
Like the racial imbalance in police shootings and traffic stops, the disparity in chase deaths could be a consequence of where crimes occur or who commits them, where police patrol, how drivers react to being stopped, or how officers respond, even subconsciously, to suspects based on their race.
Measuring police bias is tricky and often imprecise. One way researchers have tried is by comparing incidents that happened in the daytime, when it’s easier for the police to see the color of someone’s skin, with those that happened in the dark.
USA TODAY analyzed fatal pursuits the same way.
In daylight, 31% of the drivers involved in deadly police chases were black.
In darkness, 21% of the drivers in deadly chases were black.
That difference also shows up in chases that ended in non- fatal crashes. Thousands of records obtained from Texas and Tennessee — the only two states that keep track — showed almost identical patterns.
“It’s a provocative difference,” said Jeffrey Grogger, a University of Chicago professor who did the first study of traffic stops in daylight and darkness.
Additional research is needed to determine how much of the disparity is caused by police actions and how much is caused by drivers, he said. “The pattern is really striking.” Whatever its causes, the disparity is clear:
For every 100,000 black people in the United States, four were killed in police chases over the 17 years between 1999 and 2015.
For every 100,000 people who are not black, 1.5 were killed.
Those death rates are a broad measure. They cannot account for other things that might influence the death toll, including how often people of different races flee from the police. Nobody tracks that. “Disparity is not the same as discrimina- tion. But disparity does indicate the need for further investigation,” said University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, a leading expert on racial profiling.
USA TODAY found no evidence that officers overtly considered a suspect’s race in deciding whether to stop or pursue.
But research suggests that a suspect’s race can subtly influence how police react to him or her.
“Even when people think they’re not using race in decision- making in law enforcement, there is this way we as humans see people — particularly black people — as criminal or potentially criminal,” said Delores Jones- Brown, director of the John Jay College Center on Race, Crime and Justice.
“It’s an issue of institutionalized racism, that communities of color are not valued as much as communities not of color.” Michigan state Rep. Sheldon Neeley