Irving police dispute law school's racial profiling study

12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, September 24, 2009
By BRANDON FORMBY
bformby@dallasnews.com

Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd on Wednesday disputed a California law school's study that said there was strong evidence that Irving police racially profiled Hispanics to put them through an immigration deportation program.

Boyd said researchers at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity used faulty methods and discounted other police initiatives to reach their conclusions.

"We were not ever contacted by them in the production of this report, so I don't know what they did," Boyd said. "I can only look at what the actual data provides and look at the report they produced and see the discrepancies and the difference."

Aarti Kohli, a co-author of the study, said researchers used sound methodology and even submitted their report to a peer review by a social scientist.

"We used sound methods with quality researchers who have done research in the past," Kohli said.


Council hears findings

Boyd presented his findings to Irving City Council members during their Wednesday work session in response to the academic study released last week. He said the Police Department's data did not suggest police racially profiled Hispanics.

"It simply does not support it," Boyd said.

The study also said Irving police probably referred lawful residents to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of Irving's Criminal Alien Program, which checks the citizenship status of inmates.

The institute that performed the study is part of the law school at the University of California-Berkeley. It uses university and private funding to develop research aimed at informing advocacy groups, legislators and the public.

Boyd said that one major error was that researchers used surnames to determine ethnicity.

Kohli said researchers also relied on where arrestees said they were born and on racial data that was provided in some instances.

"It's a method social scientists use all the time," she said.

Also, Boyd said, the institute made its own determination of which arrests were based solely on an officer witnessing a crime first-hand.

Boyd said nothing in the data that the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas provided to the institute would have allowed researchers to accurately make such a determination. Boyd said he did not run his own analysis of that claim, saying that doing so would require looking through thousands of narrative descriptions of the events that led up to each arrest.

"That kind of information would maybe be interesting to you for a variety of reasons or for someone else, but I really have no need for that information," he said.


Numbers in dispute

Boyd said that the institute also was wrong to say that whites were arrested more than people of other races overall while Hispanics were more likely to be arrested for low-level crimes. He said that by his analysis, Hispanics were arrested more than other races overall.

And, Boyd said, the institute did not factor other reasons into why Hispanic arrests went up in the months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials started round-the-clock sweeps of the Irving jail.

He said the number of arrests of blacks, whites and Hispanics all rose in the summer of 2007 because of police initiatives to combat crime.

Boyd also said that the institute was wrong when it said that only 2 percent of referrals to ICE stemmed from felony arrests. Boyd said that number is actually 15 percent.

Irving City Council members panned the study and painted the report as the product of a left-wing institution that tried to fault police.

Kohli called such comments baseless. We didn't create the data," she said. "We are an academic institution, and our reputation rests on our ability to do unbiased research. Why would we risk that?"

Mayor Herbert Gears said he had little concern over the opinions laid out in the study and was more concerned about what council members thought of the department.

"I'm less worried about what some entity in California thinks," Gears said. "I'm sure there's someone in Alaska that doesn't like what we do, too."

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