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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 10:20 pm
Time: 10:20 pm
Results for driving while black
2 results foundAuthor: Gideon's Army Title: Driving While Black: A report on racial profiling in Metro Nashville Police Department Traffic Stops Summary: Our report shows that "driving while black" constitutes a unique series of risks, vulnerabilities, and dangers at the hands of the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) that white drivers do not experience in the same way. Upon reviewing MNPD’s traffic stop database, our report finds that: • Between 2011-2015, MNPD conducted 7.7 times more traffic stops annually than the U.S. national average • Between 2011-2015, MNPD made more stops of black people than there were black people 16 years old and over living in Davidson County • Between 2011-2015, MNPD consistently and unnecessarily stopped and searched black drivers in predominantly black, Hispanic, and low-income communities at rates substantially higher than they did white drivers in predominantly middle to upper income communities • MNPD consent searches are invasive and fail to yield incriminating evidence 88.4% of the time. • Evidence of unlawful activity is found during searches of white drivers more often than in searches of black and Hispanic drivers • Nearly 80% of all MNPD traffic stops in 2015 result in a warning, and, in traffic stops including a search of the vehicle or driver, between one-third and half result in a warning, which means hundreds of thousands of drivers are being stopped and searched unnecessarily every year • Since 2012, Operation Safer Streets (OSS) has resulted in more than 58,000 vehicle stops and 11,000 arrests, the vast majority of which were concentrated in communities of color. More than 90% of OSS arrests were for misdemeanors, often for possession of small amounts of marijuana or driving without a license, and more than 80% of stops yielded no evidence that warranted arrest. Our interviews with black drivers in Nashville show that: • Metro police officers regularly intimidate, harass, and unfairly exert their authority over black drivers • Aggressive tactics by officers result in traumatizing experiences of fear for one’s safety and the safety of one’s family and friends • Black drivers experience anger at being treated unjustly and disrespectfully, frustration derived from being profiled because of one's race and its assumed correspondence to criminality, and the feeling that police do not "serve and protect" black people like they do white people Through these findings, our report shows that MNPD's traffic stop practices impose a severe disparate or discriminatory impact on the predominantly black and low-income communities that MNPD’s traffic stop and search regime disproportionately targets. MNPD's internal reports justify these disparities based on an alleged correlation between where stops are made and the number of crime reports in the area. However, our findings show that traffic enforcement targets and impacts entire communities, not just people who commit crimes, and that regardless of the area, black people are searched at much higher rates than white people. For these reasons, racial disparities in policing are unlikely to be caused by individual officers’ behaviors alone, but by institutional norms and policies that justify targeting predominantly black and low-income communities. The MNPD traffic stop lesson plan used as part of officer training shows that the department is primarily focused on using traffic stops as a way to gain entry into vehicles and search them (See Section II). In practice, this means making pretextual traffic stops for technicalities, such as rolling through a stop sign or having a broken taillight, in order to get an opportunity to make contact with the occupants, use manipulative forms of engagement to gain consent to search, and search drivers and their vehicles. While the lesson plan does not explicitly prioritize stops and searches of black drivers, MNPD disproportionately deploys its patrol officers to predominantly black and low-income communities, and as our report shows, black drivers are more likely than white drivers to be stopped, stopped multiple times in a year, and searched during a traffic stop, even though searches of black drivers are less successful in yielding criminal evidence than are searches of white drivers. MNPD's overwhelmingly unsuccessful and disparately impactful over-policing of predominantly black and low-income communities raises serious concerns about the effectiveness, legitimacy, and constitutionality of MNPD's traffic stop and search regime. Furthermore, the fact that Nashville's unnecessarily high rate of total traffic stops does not reduce traffic accidents and injuries (Finding 1) and does not appear to make any significant impact on crime rates compared to other cities making fewer stops (Demand 1) calls MNPD's policing strategies into question both legally and ethically. The core findings of our report analyze traffic stops of black, white, and Hispanic drivers. Details: Nashville, TN: Gideon's Army, 2016. 213p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 23, 2017 at: https://drivingwhileblacknashville.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/driving-while-black-gideons-army.pdf Year: 2016 Country: United States URL: https://drivingwhileblacknashville.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/driving-while-black-gideons-army.pdf Shelf Number: 144558 Keywords: Driving While BlackRacial DisparitiesRacial ProfilingRacial Profiling in Law EnforcementStop and SearchTraffic StopsTraffic Violations |
Author: Southern Poverty Law Center Title: Racial Profiling in Louisiana: Unconstitutional and Counterproductive Summary: Racial profiling - the unconstitutional practice of law enforcement targeting individuals due to the color of their skin - remains an egregious and common form of discrimination and continues to taint the legitimacy of policing in the United States. It is both pervasive and hard to prove. Stopping an individual merely for "driving while black" violates the U.S. and Louisiana constitutions, but few cases have been brought in state or federal courts in Louisiana to challenge racially discriminatory policing. Racial profiling is also problematic from a public safety perspective because it undercuts effective police work by damaging trust in law enforcement. Racial profiling is likely a major driver of Louisiana's high incarceration rate. Although Oklahoma has now surpassed Louisiana as the world's No. 1 incarcerator, Louisiana remains a close second. By expanding the pool of people who come under police surveillance, racial profiling leads police to refer a disproportionate number of people of color for criminal prosecution, often for low-level crimes such as drug possession. Police officers' disproportionate focus on people of color means that they are disproportionately ticketed, arrested, prosecuted, and ultimately imprisoned. In 2016, for instance, black adults comprised only 30.6% of Louisiana's adult population but 53.7% of adults who were arrested and 67.5% of adults in prison. Overall, black adults are 4.3 times as likely as white adults to be serving a felony prison sentence in Louisiana. The SPLC has found large racial disparities in arrest rates across the state that would be difficult to explain by different rates of crime commission alone. For example, in 2016, black people were 2.9 times as likely as white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in Louisiana, despite evidence that black people and white people use marijuana at similar rates. The disparities are much greater in some areas: A black person was six times as likely as a white person to be arrested by the Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) for marijuana possession in 2016. Gretna, previously labeled the "arrest capital of the United States" for its sky-high arrest rate, continues to target black people disproportionately for arrests: In 2016, black people comprised two-thirds of people arrested in Gretna but only one-third of the city's population.15 And 67% of the arrests of black people in Gretna were for the nonviolent offenses of drug possession (not sale), drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and other offenses that the FBI does not track due to their relatively minor nature. The death of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, at the hands of two white BRPD officers on July 5, 2016 highlighted decades-long tensions in Louisiana's capital over police treatment of Louisianans of color, especially African Americans. From the department's crackdown on civil rights marchers in the 1960s, to its illegal searches and arrests in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (which raised alarm bells among out-of-state police officers dispatched to the city to assist with public safety), to its militarized response to the protests over Alton Sterling's death,20 the BRPD has consistently over-policed the city's black community and violated the First Amendment rights of people who speak out against police brutality. If the BRPD ever hopes to resolve these longstanding tensions and earn the trust and respect of the city's black residents, who comprise a majority of its population, combatting racial profiling will be an essential first step. Notwithstanding the well-known harms of racial profiling in Baton Rouge and across the state, both for over-policed communities and for public safety more generally, a surprising number of Louisiana police departments do not have policies to address it. The SPLC's investigation revealed that more than a third of the state's law enforcement agencies lack any policy on racial profiling. And the policies that do exist usually fail to explain clearly to officers what racial profiling is and what conduct is prohibited. While the much-needed sentencing reforms Louisiana began implementing in 2017 are projected to reduce the state's prison population by 10% over the next 10 years, resulting in savings of $262 million, none of the reforms focus on the disproportionate policing of Louisianans of color. Eliminating racial profiling must be a priority if Louisiana wants to shed its status as one of the world's most prolific incarcerators. To address these harms, Louisiana law enforcement agencies must adopt and enforce effective policies against racial profiling and take other steps to ensure constitutional policing. For their parts, the Legislature and the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Criminal Justice should institute a host of reforms to curb this unconstitutional and counterproductive practice. Details: Montgomery, AL: SPLC, 2018. 52p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 20, 2018 at: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/leg_special_report_racial_final.pdf Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/leg_special_report_racial_final.pdf Shelf Number: 151597 Keywords: Driving While BlackPolice BrutalityRacial BiasRacial DiscriminationRacial DisparitiesRacial Profiling in Law Enforcement |