Sample Essay Topic
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Minorities get searched more often by Patrol
Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans pulled over by the State Patrol are 2-1/2 times as likely as whites to be forced to submit to a search, the agency revealed in a report that hints at racial profiling among police.
"One of the reasons we collected the data was to get away from the anecdotal and to have something that is proof, one way or another," Patrol Chief Annette Sandberg said. "This data changes the debate. Now we can look at actual facts and come to terms that we need to examine our behavior as police officers on how we treat people after an initial traffic stop."
Community leaders say state troopers aren't the biggest problem. They hope the report lights a fire under legislative efforts to require the collection of traffic-stop data by local police departments, which receive the majority of racial-profiling complaints.
"Even the most professional police department in this state has a significant discrepancy on searches," said Sen. Adam Kline, a Democrat whose district includes Southeast Seattle. "It lends a great deal of credibility to the complaints I've heard over and over again from people in my district."
The Patrol analyzed all of its 338,885 traffic stops from May to October to determine whether motorists were treated disproportionately on the basis of race. The report, released yesterday, says troopers were as likely to stop white motorists as they were nonwhite ones. But Sandberg said she was startled by the report's findings on what happened after the stops.
Nonwhites accounted for 16 percent of all traffic stops but for 26 percent of all searches. Yet the chance of troopers finding contraband in a search was less for nonwhites than for whites. Troopers found contraband in 22 percent of searches of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans and in 33 percent of searches of white motorists.
"The higher percentage of searches with less results clearly raises concerns," Sandberg said. "It conjures up a whole series of questions in my mind. What was the basis to ask for the search to begin with? Are we relying too much on intuition that may subconsciously be a race factor?"
Searches are uncommon for all races but significantly more common for nonwhites. During the period of the study, troopers searched 2 percent of white motorists they pulled over but 4.9 percent of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.
The report also indicates that after whites are pulled over, they get off without a ticket 62 percent of the time, compared with 48 percent for African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.
"I am alarmed and very much concerned," said Tony Orange, executive director of the state Commission on African-American Affairs. "The reason I have to be restrained in my comments is that we don't know what the numbers will show elsewhere, which is why we want the information gathered."
Racial profiling, the notion that police make decisions - consciously or subconsciously - on the basis of race, has become a huge political issue nationally and is increasingly coming to the fore in Washington. Last summer, Seattle police acknowledged they were issuing a disproportionate number of traffic tickets to minorities and agreed to do a follow-up study. The department, however, is not yet compiling traffic-stop data.
During the 2000 legislative session, state Sen. Rosa Franklin, D-Tacoma, sponsored a bill that would have mandated local law-enforcement agencies to collect traffic-stop data and present annual analyses to the state. The bill that eventually passed only encouraged voluntary participation, such as the analysis done by the State Patrol. Sandberg plans to brief lawmakers on her agency's report at a Monday hearing in Olympia.
The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs is supporting the idea of amassing traffic-stop data, but only if an individual department chooses to collect it and only if the state foots the bill. Larry Erickson, the association's executive director, declined to comment on the Patrol report until he testifies before the Legislature about it on Monday.
Onofre Contreras, executive director of the state Commission on Hispanic Affairs, said he thinks the report points to a trend of what is happening on roads patrolled by local police departments.
"This may just be the tip of the iceberg," he said. "We finally have real numbers that fall in line with what we have heard anecdotally. People tell us stories of being stopped, having their car searched and then they are let go. But being released doesn't take away from the fact that they feel harassed.
"Discrimination is usually proven because a pattern emerges. But that pattern cannot emerge unless there is documentation. For communities of color, the issue has always been to let us have the documentation and let us see what the reality is."
Sandberg, who is stepping down from her post soon, said the agency plans to analyze the report to determine whether disproportionate treatment is more prevalent in certain areas of the state. The agency plans to hold out the report as a reason to re-educate officers on proper search-and-seizure techniques.
"Sometimes making people aware helps change behavior," she said.
Seattle Times research editor Tom Boyer contributed to this report