Tuesday, November 13, 2012

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.

5 comments:

Steve said...

News flash: All people may be created equal, but it does not mean all people are equally intelligent, friendly, wise, courteous, moral, law-abiding, or most any other human characteristic. There will be racial disparity in almost any measurement one cares to examine. It does not necessarily follow that there is some kind of vendetta against minorities simply because the rates of arrests or incarceration are higher among one group than another. That being said, it doesn't preclude the possibility that an individual, or even an organization, might might act with a racial bias.

Anonymous said...

Many careers have been ruined by accusations of being a bigot or racist. Smart criminals know this and use it to their benefit. Our news media uses it also to sell advertising. We live in a society where the biggest SIN is to be judgmental.
Gun Nut

Anonymous said...

If you run that ALPR unit through and near the Lodge Apts at about 4 am and pull the owners info, you'll probably get quite different racial demo chars on those owners than you would if you ran it through the firethorn subdiv, even though both are in the SE B beat.

Anonymous said...

There's a punch line in there somewhere...

"They do racial profile training? I thought the cops did fine without being trained!"

Anonymous said...

Off subject, but I see our old friend Mephian Washington is once again doing time. He must like your facilities. Can't he be be considered a habitual offender and given one long sentence.