The unequal use of force
Data show Blacks disproportionately face more aggressive tactics
Naphtali Israel filled with disgust as he watched the video of Aurora police holding four sobbing girls at gunpoint.
He knows what kind of trauma the children will have to overcome. His stepdaughters were held at gunpoint by Denver police just a few months earlier after a false report that a Black man had a gun in a Safeway parking lot.
His 14-year-old stepdaughter has flashbacks from staring down the barrel of a gun. His 8-year-old has nightmares.
“When is it going to stop?” Israel asked. “When does a Black face get the same equality of everyone else in the community? We’re seeing the same situations over and over again.”
Amid protests of police brutality and a national reckoning of centuries of racism, data from the Aurora and Denver police departments give credence to what Black residents here have been saying for years: Police in two of Colorado’s largest cities disproportionately use force against them.
Nearly half of the people Aurora police officers struck, tackled, pepper-sprayed, Tased or shot in 2019 were Black, although Black people make up 16% of the city’s population, department data show. In Denver last year, Black people made up 27% of the 1,191 people Denver police used force against, in a city where 10% of the population is Black.
No other racial demographic, in either city, had such a wide gap, and such racial disparities are shown in the cities’ data going back at least four years.
Neither police department could explain the numbers easily. Community leaders and experts point to the intersection of poverty, over-policing, implicit bias and systemic racism to explain the numbers — overlapping, complex
“There are national protests because of what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. Why? Because what happened to him mirrors the experience of Black people nationwide.”
issues that make it difficult to analyze use-of-force data.
“Plenty of studies have shown there is a presumption of criminality when police officers arrive on the scene and there are Black people there,” said Delores JonesBrown of the University of New Haven’s Department of Criminal Justice and founder of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “With the presumption of criminality there is the presumption of violence, which creates fear. And fear drives use of force.”
The statistics from Denver and Aurora are no surprise to Black community leaders.
“There are national protests because of what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis,” said Omar Montgomery, president of the Aurora branch of the NAACP. “Why? Because what happened to him mirrors the experience of Black people nationwide.”
Years of disparity
The Aurora police department recently committed to investigating the causes for the disparity after Councilwoman Angela Lawson raised concerns about the data during several council meetings.
“There was use-of-force data that was presented at the public safety, courts and civil service meeting that drew questions from the committee,” Aurora police Chief Vanessa Wilson said in a statement after declining an interview with The Denver Post on the topic. “Since then, we have set out to try and analyze the data to get a better overall understanding of those numbers. That analysis is not yet completed, so speaking to why those numbers reflect the way they do would be speculation. It is something that we are going to continue to look into and see if there are any areas that we can improve policy (and) procedures, or how we better interact with our community.”
But the data are not new. The percentage of Black people whom Aurora officers use force against has hovered from 38% to 53% since 2014 — consistently disproportionate to the Black population of the city. The department’s annual use-of-force reports from those years include that data, but only one report mentions the discrepancy, and that mention is very brief.
“It is interesting to note that with the exception of AfricanAmerican/black, the remaining racial groups were within sixteen percentage points of the city’s population,” stated a report analyzing data from October through September 2016.
The report offered no further analysis.
A more detailed breakdown of the numbers reveal further disparities. Last year, Aurora police on 86 occasions used Tasers against Black people, while white people were shocked 37 times.
In Denver, Black people have represented 26% to 30% of the population whom police used 2015 force against since at least 2016.
Denver police Chief Paul Pazen said his officers most often are responding to calls for service and reported crimes, which dictates the people with whom they interact. The officers don’t get to choose. He wouldn’t answer questions specifically about the racial demographic data.
“Our objective is to reduce use of force all the way around. It’s not only good for our community