MAPS FOR: Jurisdictions Collecting Data | Legislation | Litigation | Community Groups

Spotlight

The following are past spotlights on various aspects of the data collection process.

View year:      2002   2003   2004   2005   2006   2007

• Oakland Police Department's 2004 Final Report Released Oakland Police Department. July 19, 2004.
  Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling, a report recently released by the Oakland Police Department, focuses on the department’s efforts to combat both the perception and reality of racial profiling in the city of Oakland.
• Massachusetts: Massachusetts Racial and Gender Profiling Final Report. May 04, 2004.
  The Institute on Race and Justice, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety, released the Racial and Gender Profiling Study Final Report on May 4, 2004. The Final Report Executive Summary and the Final Report attempt to answer the mandate of Chapter 228 of the Acts of 2000 to identify and provide to the Secretary of Public Safety a listing of state police units or municipalities that appear to have engaged in racial or gender profiling.
• Project on Police-Citizen Contacts Year 1 Final Report
  Professor Robin Engel. February 02, 2004.
  Professor Robin Engel’s report, Project on Police-Citizen Contacts, was commissioned by the Pennsylvania State Police in an effort to determine whether there were departmental disparities in traffic stops and their outcomes due to the race and ethnicity of the drivers involved.
• PERF Releases Guide to Analyzing Race Data February, 2004.
  The Police Executive Research Forum recently released By the Numbers: A Guide for Analyzing Race Data From Vehicle Stops, a guide for law enforcement agencies and other stakeholders on how to analyze, interpret, and understand vehicle stop data being collected on drivers' race. With COPS funding, PERF is holding two conferences this summer on analyzing vehicle stop data.
• Group Releases Texas Traffic Stops and Searches Study Steward Research Group. February, 2004.
  The Steward Research Group has just released a study analyzing data from 413 Texas law enforcement agencies. The dataset includes several million police-civilian contacts, representing the majority of traffic stops in Texas. The report analyzes each contributing agency’s self-reported statistics, as well as the quality of the reports produced, in order to better inform policy leaders, law enforcement agencies, and community members about the problem and the perception of racial profiling. This is the largest set of racial profiling data that has ever been collected and analyzed.
• IRJ Releases Preliminary Numbers in Massachusetts Racial and Gender Profiling Study January 20, 2004.
  The Institute on Race and Justice, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety, released preliminary tabulations in the Massachusetts statewide Racial and Gender Profiling Study. Click to download the pdf file (Note: large file (2.1 MB)), which includes the report narrative, instructions, and tables, or the excel file (Note: large file (1.7 MB)), which includes only the information contained in the tables.

• Background and Current Data Collection Efforts
  • Introduction to Data Collection
  • History of Racial Profiling Analysis
  • Jurisdictions Currently Collecting Data
  • Glossary of Terms
  • General FAQs
• Community and Civil Rights Initiatives
  • How Communities Become Involved
  • Community and Civil Rights Groups
  • Testimonials
  • Getting Started and Going Ahead
• Legislation and Litigation
  • Legislation
  • Federal and State Litigation
  • DOJ Investigations
  • Related Court Authority
  • Journal Articles and Law Reviews
• Planning, Training, and Implementation
  • Data Collection Elements
  • Developing Partnerships
  • Training Materials
  • Funding the Project
  • Using Technology
  • FAQs
• Reporting and Analysis
  • Introduction
  • Reports
  • Data Collection
  • Auditing
  • Benchmarks
  • Reporting
  • Problem Solving
• Library and Archives
  • Reports
  • Journal Articles and Law Reviews
  • News Items
  • Spotlights
  • Glossary of Terms

ANALYSIS OF RACIAL DISPARITIES IN THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT'S STOP, QUESTION, AND FRISK PRACTICES

RAND Corporation

In 2006, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) stopped a half-million pedestrians for suspected criminal involvement. Raw statistics for these encounters suggest large racial disparities — 89 percent of the stops involved nonwhites. Do these statistics point to racial bias in police officers’ decisions to stop particular pedestrians? Do they indicate that officers are particularly intrusive when stopping nonwhites? The NYPD asked the RAND Center on Quality Policing (CQP) to help it understand this issue and identify recommendations for addressing potential problems. CQP researchers analyzed data on all street encounters between NYPD officers and pedestrians in 2006. They compared the racial distribution of stops to external benchmarks, attempts to construct what the racial distribution of the stopped pedestrians would have been if officers’ stop decisions had been racially unbiased. Then they compared each officer’s stopping patterns with an internal benchmark constructed from stops in similar circumstances made by other officers. Finally, they examined stop outcomes, assessing whether stopped white and nonwhite suspects have different rates of frisk, search, use of force, and arrest. They found small racial differences in these rates and make communication, recordkeeping, and training recommendations to the NYPD for improving police-pedestrian interactions.

FLORIDA: JACKSONVILLE POLICE RECEIVE NO RACIAL PROFILING COMPLAINTS IN ’08

The Jacksonville Police Department presented its annual Racial Profiling Report which covers Calendar Year 2008 and showed that JPD received no formal reports of racial profiling. It also confirmed that local police are conducting traffic stops using legal criteria and not race as their motivation for enforcement action. Currently, the Texas Racial Profiling Law requires that police departments collect data pertaining to traffic stops, pedestrian stops, searches conducted and citations issued.

TEXAS: BELLAIRE MAYOR TO INVESTIGATE RACIAL PROFILING ALLEGATIONS

The mayor of Bellaire responded publicly for the first time to allegations of racial profiling due to an incident of mistaken identity. Officers will now be required to participate in additional cultural sensitivity training. The city is also hiring an independent state consultant to analyze traffic stop data for 2008 and look for incidents of racial profiling. The mayor also promised to release the results of the district attorney's investigation publicly, once it is completed.

CALIFORNIA: TORRANCE POLICE PROFILING SUIT IS DEFEATED

A woman who claimed she was wrongly arrested by Torrance police because of her race has lost her federal lawsuit against the city, a former chief and two officers. Sara Plowden, who lived in Gardena when she filed the civil rights lawsuit in January 2006, claimed she was subjected to a "driving while black" arrest early on Nov. 23, 2003. She claimed the officers physically accosted her and that city officials and former Police Chief James Herren allowed "an atmosphere of lawlessness, abuse and misconduct" to fester in the department.

ARKANSAS: ARIZONA DPS TIGHTENS SEARCH RULES TO AVOID PROFILING

The Arizona Department of Public Safety, in moves intended to prevent and detect racial profiling, is making internal changes that include requiring Highway Patrol officers to document why they search vehicles they stop. Other changes announced by Gov. Janet Napolitano's office include requiring officers to obtain a motorist's consent for a search to get the driver's signature or to use video or audio to record the driver giving permission verbally.

UTAH: UTAH HIGHWAY PATROL OFFICER ACCUSED OF RACIAL PROFILING

Sherida Felders, a black grandmother, alleges a Utah Highway Patrol officer had no reason to believe her Jeep Commander contained illegal substances, but called in a drug-sniffing dog after stopping her for speeding Felders has filed a suit accusing the trooper of conducting an illegal search of her vehicle for drugs based on racial profiling.