Racial bias is “real,” Denver minorities say

Twenty-four years after it happened, Alecia Peabody remembers every detail of the first time she got pulled over by a police officer.

The cop’s U-turn on to South Santa Fe Drive in Littleton. His headlights behind her for two miles.

The nervousness. The missed turn signal.

And then the humiliation of being ordered out of the car by a stern voice over a loudspeaker and the glare of a spotlight on her face.

She was 16 and driving her father’s Mercedes-Benz.

“People were driving by and

looking and looking and looking,” said Peabody, now 40. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t do that with anybody else. It’s stuck with me all of these years.”

People of color do not receive the same treatment by police officers that white people are afforded, said Peabody and other minorities who spoke to The Denver Post.

This, Peabody said, is why the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black, by police Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, in Ferguson, Mo., has meant so much to so many people.

And it’s why many are hurt by a grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson.

“Folks have never understood what we go through on a day-today basis. It’s real,” said Dom Barrera, a 23-year-old youth counselor in Denver. “When you speak about it around those who don’t look like you, A) It’s uncomfortable and B) they think you have an ignorant response.”

The Ferguson case has resonated with people across the country and reignited the national debate about police interaction with minorities. And while race relations in Denver may not be as heated as they are in other cities, fear exists among minorities — even if they haven’t done anything wrong — when they encounter police.

Nathan Woodliff-Stanley, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, said he has no doubt racial bias exists even if police are not overtly racist.

“I don’t think there’s been another lesson I’ve learned more while working here than the reality of racial bias in our justice system,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be intentional to be real.”

It is hard to measure whether Denver police stop minorities more often than whites because statistics are not available, he said.

“A good first step would be to start collecting that kind of data,” he said.

And while Latinos experience racial bias, “The experience of African-Americans goes deep and wide in terms of this problem,” Woodliff-Stanley said.

Tania Soto Valenzuela, a 25year-old Mexican immigrant in Denver, said she sympathizes with the photos and videos of African-Americans protesting in Ferguson.

She, too, believes she has been targeted because of her appearance, saying lawenforcement officers have questioned her legal status.

“The police department doesn’t believe this profiling exists,” she said. “It does. I’ve seen it. As a community, we need to acknowledge that it does happen.”

Denver Police Chief Robert White agrees that racial bias happens in law enforcement across the country. He also said he has no tolerance for it, and he is trying to change the Denver Police Department’s reputation.

The department collected data on police officers’ interactions with minorities about 10 years ago, but the study did not find any disturbing trends. Since then, the data has not been collected, although White said he is not opposed to conducting another study.

White often talks about the differences between legal police action and necessary police action. In many cases where a suspect is shot by police, the officer’s actions may have been within the limits of the law.

But the public questions the necessity of the actions, White said Tuesday.

“You think you’re questioning the legality of the actions, but what we’re really questioning is were the officer’s actions necessary?” he said. “That’s the biggest gap between lawenforcement and the community.”

On a recent night, Peabody was one of about two dozen people who gathered for ameeting of the Denver Urban League’s Young Professionals.

They were a diverse lot. Pea- body is program director for the Colorado Association of Black Professional Engineers and Scientists. There were teachers, marketing gurus, financial advisers, nonprofit managers and lawyers. A few were parents. Some, such as Peabody, were raised in the suburbs by working professional parents. Others grew up in Denver’s rougher neighborhoods, scrapping their way through high school and into college.

Still, they all had one shared experience — a bad run-in with a police officer.

Quincy Shannon, president of the Urban League’s young professionals and a public school administrator, said he follows a personal checklist of howto behave if he gets pulled over by police.

• Turn off the car.

• Call someone and leave the phone on so they can hear the interaction.

• Remove the keys from ignition.

• Put hands on steering wheel.

• Make eye contact.

• Explain any movement. “Some of my co-workers have never understood that,” Shannon said. “They don’t have a systemof what they have to do if a cop pulls up.

“Situations like Ferguson are constant reminders of what happens if you don’t follow that system.”

Shannon, who sued the Denver Police Department after he was pepper-sprayed, handcuffed and jailed after an incident in Lower Downtown in 2004, said he wanted his group to have a conversation about police interactions in hopes of changing things for the better.

At the Urban League meeting, an officer had been invited to speak to the group, but he missed the meeting after an unexpected death in the family.

Still, the group held its discussion about police brutality.

They talked about Denver’s police chief, sheriff and director of public safety, all of whom are black. The leadership is an improvement, they agreed. But the city has a longway to go in repairing relations.

“The system is so deeply rooted,” Shannon said.

He longs for the day when society “decriminalizes what it means to be black.”

“We need to make sure that every person who has dreadlocks and is tall and is African-American like myself is not automatically characterized as a gangster or a thug,” Shannon said. “I hope Ferguson sheds a small light on the reality many of us live with every day.”