The LAPD & Racial Profiling

On Monday the ACLU released a report stating that a significant percentage of LAPD officers are still engaged in racial profiling. The Police Protective League, predictably howled that the study—which was conducted by a guy named Ian Ayres at Yale—had it entirely wrong. (“Dr. Ayres is trying to manipulate existing data to prove what 9,700 individual officers are thinking when they make traffic stops—which is an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles.” Blah, blah, blah. Hey, we understand. It’s the union’s job to support the troops.)

And LAPD Chief Bill Bratton said the study was bogus (or words to that effect) because it was based on figures that were much too old.

He had something of a point. Ayers and company analyzed upwards of 700,000 cases in which Los Angeles Police Department officers stopped pedestrians and/or drivers—but the figures came from between July 2003 and June 2004.

Ayres and the ACLU would have liked newer data, they said, but they were unable to wrench it away from the department.

Now Dr. Ayres has volleyed the ball back at his critics with an excellent Op Ed in this morning’s LA Times.

In it he challenges LAPD Chief Bill Bratton to let him do a brand new racial profiling study, but for the cops themselves this time, not for the ACLU—and using the departments most recent stats.

Here are some clips from Ayers’ Op Ed.

The study, which I wrote with my research assistant, Jonathan Borowsky, asked not simply whether African Americans and Latinos are stopped and searched by the LAPD more often than whites — it’s clear that they are — but the more complex question of whether these racial disparities are justified by legitimate policing practices, such as deciding to police more aggressively in high-crime neighborhoods.

We found persistent and statistically significant racial disparities in policing that raise grave concerns that African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are, as we put it in the report, “over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched and over-arrested.”

[SNIP]

Now consider this: Although stopped blacks were 127% more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, they were 42.3% less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25% less likely to be found with drugs and 33% less likely to be found with other contraband. We found similar patterns for Latinos.

Not only did we find that African Americans and Latinos were subjected to more stops, frisks, searches and arrests than whites, we also found that these additional police actions aren’t because of the fact that people of color live in higher-crime areas or because they more often carry drugs or weapons, or any other legitimate reason that we can discern from the rich set of data we examined.

Police Chief William J. Bratton quickly rejected these findings, primarily because the study used data that was more than 4 years old. This is a fair point. But we had no other choice: The department has not released the more recent stop data that it has been collecting, nor has it analyzed the more recent data to test for racial disparities. If Bratton is truly confident that unjustified racial disparities are a thing of the past, he should be able to show the change in the current data. I would be happy to organize a group of respected academics to help analyze it.

I was talking to Connie Rice the other day, and she mentioned that, while Bratton and the LAPD brass were really quite enlightened these days (and I would agree), she didn’t think the enlightenment had filtered down to the majority of the rank and file on the street. What did I think? Yes and no, I said. I think it has for some, not so much, for others.

We talked about the excellent officers we know….and those who fall in the still-needs-improvement catagory.

“I wish someone would study the issue and find out,” she said. “We need to ask how much the department has changed at a street level. And how much does it still need to change?”

A comprehensive racial profiling study with full access to all the departments’ facts and figures would take a giant leap the direction of answering Connie’s question.

So, how about it, Chief?

(But let’s get those rape kits done first.)