In a switch, police invite scrutiny of racial profiling

Updated 8h 13m ago
By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

DENVER — By the time police Sgt. Robert Motyka responds to the disturbance call at a local hospital emergency room, the man at the reception counter is clearly agitated.

His speech is unintelligible. He becomes frantic as the officer slowly approaches, urging him to calm down. In a blur of flailing arms, the man reaches for something in his back pocket.

Motyka has no time to consider the possible consequences of one of the most potentially combustible scenarios in America: a confrontation between a black man and a white officer.

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When the man pulls a knife and lunges forward, Motyka drops him with four quick pops from his 9mm Beretta. But there will be no public second-guessing of the 13-year veteran's actions. No racially charged demonstrations by civil rights activists. No calls for a review of police dealings with minorities.

In this case, Motyka was reacting to a large-screen, video simulation designed to test officers' judgment when using lethal force and scrutinize their dealings with minorities. In the end, the officer acted appropriately, according to his examiners.

The live-ammunition exercise, confined to the department's shooting range, is part of a growing body of research and training in nearly a dozen law enforcement agencies across the country aimed at eliminating persistent racial profiling by police. Researchers are examining virtually all facets of police behavior, from officers' interactions with new immigrants to car stops and the use of lethal force. More unusual, criminal justice analysts say, is that police officials are inviting the increased scrutiny, representing a generational change in law enforcement in a country that is now 34% minority.

If the July White House "beer summit" was supposed to offer a simple teaching moment after the high-profile arrest of a black Harvard scholar by a white Cambridge, Mass., officer, the research in Denver and elsewhere could provide some of the most instructive case studies on the intersection of race and law enforcement, some police analysts say.

"Law enforcement's willingness to confront issues of race represents a huge shift in modern policing," says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank. "I think you would be hard-pressed to find another institution in America more challenged by race than police. Coming out of the civil rights era, most departments were viewed (by minority communities) as occupying armies."

Wexler is leading a review of the Cambridge Police Department's role in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and convened the first meeting of a special panel there last week.

Gates' arrest on disorderly conduct charges, after a 911 caller mistakenly identified him as a possible burglar at his own home, sparked a heated national debate over racial profiling and prompted President Obama to criticize the police. Obama later apologized for saying police acted "stupidly" and hosted Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, in an effort to move the nation past a legacy of mistrust between police and minority communities.

Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, an associate dean at George Washington University Law School, says some of the ongoing research is "promising," including the work in Denver. "Police need to acknowledge there is a big problem," says Butler, who analyzes race and the criminal justice system. "I just don't think the police are there yet."

The Denver Police Department has served as a research laboratory on race for about five years. Yet in the past two years, the work has intensified as hundreds of officers have volunteered for rigorous testing to identify racial and gender bias. That includes blunt questions about all officers' views on race and the simulated use-of-force scenarios.

It is overseen by an unusual partnership between a prominent academic, Phillip Goff — a social psychology professor at the University of California-Los Angeles and a former assistant to Gates — and a top local law enforcement official, Denver Deputy Police Chief Tracie Keesee, who has a doctorate in intercultural communications.

The rare collaboration, University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris says, is shattering officers' tradition of resisting outside scrutiny, especially on race and ethnic relations. "The history of openness in American policing has not been good," says Harris, who recently joined the research team.

Goff's and Keesee's national Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity is now working with agencies in Los Angeles, San Jose, Houston, Salt Lake City, Toronto, Virginia Beach and Portland, Ore.

Among the areas of study for the researchers:

•San Jose. Researchers are combing through two decades of arrest records to see whether police have improperly targeted Hispanics and other minorities in traffic stops and arrests for public intoxication and disorderly conduct.

Last year, a San Jose Mercury News report found San Jose had the most public intoxication arrests of any city in California and that 57% of those arrested were Hispanic. About 32% of the city's population is Hispanic, city spokesman Tom Manheim says.

San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis says the researchers' access to department data is "unprecedented" and that "if there is some evidence of biased policing, we want to know whether we're missing something in recruiting, hiring or training."

• Salt Lake City. Researchers are examining the impact of controversial state legislation that allows local police to enforce federal immigration laws, including the detection of illegal immigrants. Among the department's concerns, Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank says, is that the law is fostering mistrust of police in Hispanic communities and discouraging Hispanics — legal and illegal — from reporting crimes. About 30% of the city's population is Hispanic, Burbank says.

•Houston. Researchers are studying stun-gun use after a 2008 city audit found that black suspects are disproportionately involved in stun-gun incidents. About 25% of Houston's population is black.

The audit of 1,417 stun-gun uses from 2004 to 2007 also found that white and Hispanic officers were more likely than black officers to fire their stun guns when suspects were black.

In each city, Goff says, police invited the scrutiny. "My sense is that law enforcement is in the midst of a sea change in leadership on this issue," he says.

Tense relations in Denver

Denver has not had the incendiary racial profiling incidents that have plagued some other cities.

It has avoided the iconic images of the 1991 Rodney King beating in Los Angeles or the national uproar after the 1999 mistaken fatal shooting in New York of black immigrant Amadou Diallo.

Yet Denver, like most other large U.S. cities, has not been immune to officers' struggles with race.

Joseph G. Sandoval, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, says the police department has labored to overcome a reputation for aggressive treatment of minorities.

One of the most controversial incidents occurred in July 2003. During a domestic disturbance call, an officer fatally shot a 15-year-old mentally disabled black child who was wielding a knife at his family's home. The officer was suspended for "tactical and judgment errors" related to the encounter; a city review of the incident concluded he helped force the confrontation. Less than a year after the shooting, the city settled a civil lawsuit for $1.3 million filed by the boy's family.

Since 2005, activists, including Lisa Calderon, an organizer for the Denver group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, have accused police of racial profiling in their enforcement of a citywide "broken windows" policing strategy. The concept is that cracking down on small crimes, including vandalism and public intoxication, will reduce the likelihood of more serious crime. Calderon says the strategy has targeted minorities and has demanded that the department change its tactics.

Keesee says the unsettled relations between the minority community and police prompted the department to confront delicate issues, from gender and race to enforcement tactics, and led to the collaboration with Goff. "You have to have these conversations," she says.

Critics such as Calderon and Sandoval are encouraged by the research on possible bias. "I think there is a commitment to change the culture," says Calderon, who is working with the department to secure a $400,000 private grant to create a community "immersion" course for new police recruits. The goal, she says, is to require recruits to spend time in the communities they will police before they start working the streets.

In one of the most elaborate research efforts, consortium investigators have tracked 200 Denver officers since 2004 to try to measure which is more effective in reducing racial or ethnic bias: experiences in the training academy, or time patrolling.

The work grew out of an earlier project involving about 124 Denver officers and a sample group of civilians. That review, published in 2007, used an interactive computer program to determine that both police and civilians displayed "robust racial bias in response speed" in shooting scenarios involving racially mixed targets. Researchers also found that officers were less likely to shoot when they shouldn't.

"It can be a daunting proposition to start something like this," says Joshua Correll, an experimental social psychologist at the University of Chicago, who is leading the 200-officer review. "Historically there has not been a lot of trust between police departments and academia."

Diallo shooting a 'turning point'

One of the most important catalysts for change among police departments, Wexler says, was the Diallo shooting in New York a decade ago.

In that case, four officers fired 41 times at Diallo, who they wrongly believed was pulling a gun. Police later determined he was reaching for his wallet.

"That was a huge turning point, showing that racial profiling does exist," Wexler says.

It's no coincidence that on the Denver police range, the video-simulated shooting scenarios display eerie similarities to some of the nation's most tragic confrontations between police and minorities, including Diallo's.

Motyka, who has never fired on a live target in 13 years on the force, acknowledged thinking before shooting that the man in the hospital video — like Diallo — "could have been pulling out a wallet." But Motyka says the only factor that influenced his decision to shoot was the threat of the knife, and the man's race played no role.

That type of thinking, Denver firearms technician Robert Winckler says, is a product of the department's special training. "The only thing that should matter is whether you have the legal right" to take the shot when the officer is threatened, he says.

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