Racial profiling training

A couple of years ago, the Nebraska Law Enforcement Training Center asked me to teach a segment on racial profiling in the week-long course for law enforcement managers. This course is a requirement for officers promoted to managerial ranks.  I had done a similar class for staff at the Lincoln police department a few times, which probably was the reason I was asked to teach the topic at NLETC. I took the drive out to Grand Island last week to teach my most recent session.

My original approach was focused on explaining the law and emphasizing the requirements imposed on Nebraska law enforcement agencies for collecting and reporting data. Over time, I have included some significant discussion of the racial disparity in motor vehicle stops, and the variety of potential explanations for the disparity.  One of the things I've been emphasizing lately is that racially disparate police practices are not necessarily ill-intentioned: a strategy employed by an individual officer or an agency can have a disparate impact even when the motive for its had no biased intention whatsoever.

It is up to managers and supervisors to recognize these, and to make informed decisions on whether the need to employ the strategy is worth the disparate impact it might have. A good example would be a decision on where to locate a sobriety checkpoint.  In a diverse city, the location selected could have a huge impact on the racial composition of the drivers stopped.  Other examples abound. In Lincoln, if you assigned a patrol car equipped with an automated license plate reader system in the Southwest Team area on A Beat, the demographic characteristics of drivers stopped, ticketed, and arrested as a result of its use would be far different than if the same equipment had been deployed on the Southeast Team's B Beat.

Early in my career, there was an illegal after hours speakeasy in Lincoln's Malone neighborhood patronized almost exclusively by black customers. A couple times each year, the place would be raided, a few guys would receive tickets for being inmates of a disorderly house, and the police would cart off a makeshift craps table, a couple coolers of beer, and a cigar box of cash.  Out in east Lincoln however, was a legendary night spot with a much more sophisticated collection of gambling paraphernalia, and casino nights that--if the rumors were true--made Charlie's dice game look pretty insignificant by comparison. I don't ever recall it being raided.