racial profiling statistics essay

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10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S.

Days of protests across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police have brought new attention to questions about police officers’ attitudes toward black Americans, protesters and others. The public’s views of the police, in turn, are also in the spotlight. Here’s a roundup of Pew Research Center survey findings from the past few years about the intersection of race and law enforcement.

How we did this

Most of the findings in this post were drawn from two previous Pew Research Center reports: one on police officers and policing issues published in January 2017, and one on the state of race relations in the United States published in April 2019. We also drew from a September 2016 report on how black and white Americans view police in their communities. (The questions asked for these reports, as well as their responses, can be found in the reports’ accompanying “topline” file or files.)

The 2017 police report was based on two surveys. One was of 7,917 law enforcement officers from 54 police and sheriff’s departments across the U.S., designed and weighted to represent the population of officers who work in agencies that employ at least 100 full-time sworn law enforcement officers with general arrest powers, and conducted between May and August 2016. The other survey, of the general public, was conducted via the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) in August and September 2016 among 4,538 respondents. (The 2016 report on how blacks and whites view police in their communities also was based on that survey.) More information on methodology is available here .

The 2019 race report was based on a survey conducted in January and February 2019. A total of 6,637 people responded, out of 9,402 who were sampled, for a response rate of 71%. The respondents included 5,599 from the ATP and oversamples of 530 non-Hispanic black and 508 Hispanic respondents sampled from Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. More information on methodology is available here .

Majorities of both black and white Americans say black people are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police and by the criminal justice system as a whole. In a 2019 Center survey , 84% of black adults said that, in dealing with police, blacks are generally treated less fairly than whites; 63% of whites said the same. Similarly, 87% of blacks and 61% of whites said the U.S. criminal justice system treats black people less fairly.

Black adults are about five times as likely as whites to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity (44% vs. 9%), according to the same survey. Black men are especially likely to say this : 59% say they’ve been unfairly stopped, versus 31% of black women.

White Democrats and white Republicans have vastly different views of how black people are treated by police and the wider justice system. Overwhelming majorities of white Democrats say black people are treated less fairly than whites by the police (88%) and the criminal justice system (86%), according to the 2019 poll. About four-in-ten white Republicans agree (43% and 39%, respectively).

Nearly two-thirds of black adults (65%) say they’ve been in situations where people acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity, while only a quarter of white adults say that’s happened to them. Roughly a third of both Asian and Hispanic adults (34% and 37%, respectively) say they’ve been in such situations, the 2019 survey found.

Black Americans are far less likely than whites to give police high marks for the way they do their jobs . In a 2016 survey, only about a third of black adults said that police in their community did an “excellent” or “good” job in using the right amount of force (33%, compared with 75% of whites), treating racial and ethnic groups equally (35% vs. 75%), and holding officers accountable for misconduct (31% vs. 70%).

In the past, police officers and the general public have tended to view fatal encounters between black people and police very differently. In a 2016 survey  of nearly 8,000 policemen and women from departments with at least 100 officers, two-thirds said most such encounters are isolated incidents and not signs of broader problems between police and the black community. In a companion survey of more than 4,500 U.S. adults, 60% of the public called such incidents signs of broader problems between police and black people. But the views given by police themselves were sharply differentiated by race: A majority of black officers (57%) said that such incidents were evidence of a broader problem, but only 27% of white officers and 26% of Hispanic officers said so.

Around two-thirds of police officers (68%) said in 2016 that the demonstrations over the deaths of black people during encounters with law enforcement were motivated to a great extent by anti-police bias; only 10% said (in a separate question) that protesters were primarily motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable for their actions. Here as elsewhere, police officers’ views differed by race: Only about a quarter of white officers (27%) but around six-in-ten of their black colleagues (57%) said such protests were motivated at least to some extent by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.

White police officers and their black colleagues have starkly different views on fundamental questions regarding the situation of blacks in American society, the 2016 survey found. For example, nearly all white officers (92%) – but only 29% of their black colleagues – said the U.S. had made the changes needed to assure equal rights for blacks.

A majority of officers said in 2016 that relations between the police in their department and black people in the community they serve were “excellent” (8%) or “good” (47%). However, far higher shares saw excellent or good community relations with whites (91%), Asians (88%) and Hispanics (70%). About a quarter of police officers (26%) said relations between police and black people in their community were “only fair,” while nearly one-in-five (18%) said they were “poor” – with black officers far more likely than others to say so. (These percentages are based on only those officers who offered a rating.)

An overwhelming majority of police officers (86%) said in 2016 that high-profile fatal encounters between black people and police officers had made their jobs harder . Sizable majorities also said such incidents had made their colleagues more worried about safety (93%), heightened tensions between police and blacks (75%), and left many officers reluctant to use force when appropriate (76%) or to question people who seemed suspicious (72%).

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Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at Pew Research Center .

Michael Lipka is an associate director focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Dalia Fahmy is a senior writer/editor focusing on religion at Pew Research Center .

Most Black Americans Believe U.S. Institutions Were Designed To Hold Black People Back

Cultural issues and the 2024 election, what the data says about crime in the u.s., fewer than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted in 2022, before release of video showing tyre nichols’ beating, public views of police conduct had improved modestly, most popular.

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Racial Profiling is a Public Health and Health Disparities Issue

Cato t. laurencin.

1 Connecticut Convergence Institute for Translation in Regenerative Engineering, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, CT 06030, USA

2 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Center for Biomedical, Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Farmington, Connecticut, United States of America

3 Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut, United States of America

4 Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America

5 Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America

6 Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America

Joanne M. Walker

Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue through its disparate and adverse health impact on those targeted by this practice, as well as members of their communities. We discuss six ways police profiling and racial discrimination adversely impact Black American health. We identify four direct and two indirect ways. Four direct ways are (1) violent confrontation with police that causes injury or death; (2) police language that escalates a confrontation through micro-aggressions or macroaggressions; (3) sub-lethal confrontations with police; (4) adverse health consequences of perceived or vicarious threat, i.e., the mere belief in potential harm by police injures health. There are two indirect ways: (5) through knowledge of or personal relationship with someone who directly experienced racial profiling; (6) through public events without a personal knowledge of the unarmed person threatened or killed by police as a result of racial profiling, but where such events cause both individuals and the community at large to perceive a threat. We support recognition of racial profiling as a public health and health disparities issue. We recommend support for community programs that address the clinical health effects of racial profiling. We also recommend widespread engagement of trauma-informed policing (TIP) that acknowledges the clinical effects of racial profiling.

1. Introduction

Racial profiling is the act of suspecting or targeting a person of a certain race on the basis of observed or assumed characteristics or behavior of a racial or ethnic group, rather than on individual suspicion [ 1 ]. Black Americans comprise 13% of the population and compared with White Americans are three times more likely to be shot and killed and five times more likely to be killed unarmed by police [ 2 , 3 ]. Black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than White teens [ 3 ]. In Black American boys between ages 15 and 19 and men between ages 20 and 39, the leading cause of death is homicide. Homicide is also the second leading cause of death in Black American young boys between ages 1 and 4 [ 4 ].

Excessive police violence can affect an individual personally and vicariously as well as the community which in turn adversely affects health. The most influential case that launched the “Black Lives Matters” movement was the case of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old boy who was unlawfully shot and killed walking home from a convenience store in 2012 [ 5 ]. In 2015, while in police custody, Freddie Grey, falsely accused of carrying an illegal switchblade, was refused medical attention upon his request which resulted in fatal injury and death [ 6 ]. The refusal of medical attention and the mistreatment while in police custody of this unarmed Black young man caused public health harms that included medication crises linked to the destruction of dozens of pharmacies, opioids from the pharmacies entering the illicit drug street market, mental health trauma, and damage to the economies of neighborhoods already burdened by high rates of unemployment and premature mortality [ 6 ]. Another influential case was that of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who was pulled over by a police officer for not using a turn signal. Sandra Bland was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer during the traffic stop and later found dead in her jail cell. Her death was ruled a suicide [ 5 ]. The officer involved was later indicted on perjury charges and fired [ 5 ]. The arrest of Sandra Bland and many others like her shows bias excessive force by police against African Americans. Have the police become unconsciously biased towards minorities through social conditioning or professional training that results in excessive suspicion of Black Americas? Violence as well as excessive police violence can greatly affect the health of an individual as well as a community causing public health and health disparity issues [ 7 ].

The senior one of us (C.T.L.) has served as a member of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition CTRP3 Task Force Advisory Board. The mission statement of the task force begins with the unambiguous statement of fact, “Racial Profiling has historically occurred, and continues to occur throughout America,” [ 8 ]. In this paper, we discuss several ways racial profiling causes’ adverse health effects in Black Americans ( Table 1 ).

Ways by which racial profiling results in health effects in Black Americans.

2. Six Ways of Racial Profiling Affecting Public Health

2.1. way 1: direct effect: confrontation with violence/injury by police resulting in death.

Racial profiling is indicative of the lasting prominence of institutionalization of racism in America. Many perceive police killings of unarmed persons or suspects as a manifestation of structural racism that implicitly assigns a lower value to Black lives [ 9 ]. These behaviors alienate communities from law enforcement, hinder community-policing effects, and cause communities to lose trust in law enforcement [ 9 ]. This negative interaction undermines effective community policing for public safety. Black Americans are three times more likely than White Americans to be shot and killed by police and five times more likely than White Americans to be killed unarmed [ 1 ]. Black Americans are also five times more likely to have a police intervention–related injury to take place [ 3 ]. According to a study by Gilbert et al., in 1994, 465 felons were killed by law enforcement officers in the line of duty, the killings were all considered justifiable homicides [ 10 ]. The number of deaths began to decrease over the next 10 years and surprisingly in 2013 were back up to 465 deaths according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports [ 10 ]. Throughout history, Black Americans have been portrayed as “monstrously aggressive and inhuman,” as was apparent in the testimony of the police officers in the killing of Michael Brown. The police officers involved portrayed Michael Brown as a “demonically aggressive, nonhuman monster,” and the media characterized him as a “thug” and a “gangster” [ 7 ]. Police violence and brutality can cause death which in turn affects the mental, physical, and emotional health of individuals as well as entire communities.

2.2. Way 2: Direct Effect: Confrontation Due to Police Language Micro-aggression/Macro-aggression by Police

The second direct effect of police racism is confrontation due to police language by micro- or macro-aggressions. Micro-aggressions are subtle, everyday verbal or nonverbal negative insults or messages to a person of a different race that may not be apparent or entirely understood to either party involved [ 11 ]. Macro-aggressions involve the act of racism towards every one of a certain race [ 11 ]. A number of reports have chronicled Black drivers perceiving more negative experiences in their interactions with police. An important study by Voigt, R., et al., focused on incidents captured on video involving police use of force on Black suspects. Voigt et al. completed an analysis using police body camera footage examined in the context of racial disparities. Officers were equal in formality between Black and White drivers but higher in respect with White drivers, with officers speaking with less respect to Black drivers [ 12 ]. A linguistic correlate from body camera footage data showed that White community members were 57% more likely to hear respectful utterances while Black community members were 61% more likely to hear a less respectful utterance from a police officer [ 12 ]. These factors lead to micro- and macro- aggressions that take place in the relationship between the police and the community.

2.3. Way 3: Direct Effect: Sub-lethal Confrontation with Police

The third direct effect is the sub-lethal confrontation with police that can involve anything from a police officer pulling a gun or yelling at an individual, to confrontations causing bodily injury. Several published studies have focused on exposure to police violence and the effects of that exposure on individuals. Police officers have the authority to stop individuals without any evidence of suspicion or wrong-doing [ 3 , 13 – 15 ]. “Terry stops” or “stop and frisk” rarely end with arrests and have been associated with adverse mental health effects such as stress responses or depressive symptoms due to police aggression [ 16 ]. Data from Geller et al. reported that ethnic minorities who have been stopped by police were more likely to have higher levels of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); PTSD was higher in Black individuals [ 16 ]. Aggressive policing has major effects on the health of individuals and communities [ 16 ]. In the US population, police violence and aggression have been associated with distress, depression, anxiety, and trauma no matter the ethnicity or race of an individual [ 17 ]. Violence from racial profiling and discrimination was directly reported to cause depression in Black American boys and men, which in turn, is a mediator for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer [ 17 ]. Mental health of young Black boys was also associated with youth witnessed trauma regardless of proximity resulting in PTSD symptoms such as hyperarousal [ 17 ]. In recent studies, Oh et al. focused on the Black population and the effects of police mistreatment on individual health. The study showed police mistreatment of a Black individual was associated with worse mental health such as psychiatric, mood, and anxiety disorders, as well as PTSD and suicidal ideation, plans, and attempts [ 18 ]. Worse mental health can also be attributed to police killings of unarmed Black Americans and racial discrimination in communities not directly affected [ 3 ], causing stress, financial strain, and institutional oppressive practices [ 19 ]. African Americans (81%) who reported racial discrimination also reported having experienced PTSD [ 20 ]. Paired together, the data suggests, “law enforcement violence is a critical but nevertheless under examined public health issue” [ 20 ].

2.4. Way 4: Direct Effect: Actual and/or Perceived Threat from Police

The fourth area in which police brutality can affect mental health is the actual and/or perceived threat from police, the concept of vicarious threat. Several studies have examined the consequences of police violence and the effects it has on people who hear about the threat of violence [ 21 , 22 ]. Studies have focused on the mental and physical effects of vicarious threat. McFarland et al. focused on changes in waist circumference of Black Americans in Nashville, TN, who had been treated unlawfully by police [ 23 ]. The study showed that traffic stops occurred predominantly in low-income Black or Hispanic communities and that Black drivers were five times more likely to be stopped per year and two times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop [ 23 ]. McFarland et al. determined that Black Americans were two to three times more likely to have a larger waist circumference than White Americans. Black Americans in general are faced with higher stress burdens than White Americans [ 23 ]. Unfair treatment by police is a stressor that has not yet fully been understood in terms of health disparities research and in the medical field [ 23 ]. Unfair treatment by police has a large effect on the Black community vicariously and personally. In one study, 45.8% of Black Americans experienced personal or vicarious unfair treatment versus 18.5% of Whites, with men reporting more personal unfair treatment and women reporting more vicarious unfair treatment [ 23 ]. Waist circumference was higher in Blacks who experience unfair treatment and higher (12%) in Black women who experienced it vicariously compared with White women [ 23 ]. Vicarious exposure to unfair treatment by police may be a factor of worse mental health in the Black community [ 23 ].

2.5. Way 5: Indirect Effect: Case Where There Is Knowledge/Relationship of an Individual Who Has Been Racially Profiled by the Police

Indirect effects on mental health from police mistreatment can occur to someone who has knowledge of or a relationship with an individual that has been mistreated or racially profiled. Physiological effects can take place due to defending the character of a loved one after the police have killed them [ 3 ]. These actions can elicit negative emotions that can be damaging to mental health [ 24 ]. The mental health effect on the knowledge or relationship one may have to someone who has been racially profiled has also been evident in young Black American boys. Boys who were interviewed on police violence were all aware that they can be targeted by a police officer and killed without any legal consequence; the exposure to this violence causes trauma [ 17 ]. Young Black boys are taught to stay out of trouble, be respectful, and avoid any confrontation with the police for fear of being mistakenly targeted and racially profiled [ 17 ]. Most recently, a study published in Science Advances focused on birth records in California from 2007 to 2016 and showed that police killings of unarmed Black men were associated with a decrease in birth weight and gestational age of Black infants [ 25 ]. For a pregnant mother, the stressors of knowing someone or hearing about police racial profiling can cause stress and have negative effects on an unborn child [ 25 ]. These emotional stressors on Black women can cause physical health to decline and can be responsible for changes in birth weight and length of gestation, in an unborn child [ 25 ]. In general, studies show that stressors in an early prenatal stage can have damaging effects to an unborn child causing consequences on childhood and adulthood development [ 26 ]. The data suggests that the killings of unarmed Black Americans are linked to decreased birth weights in Black infants but not in other races, accounting for a third of the Black- White gap, indicating the effect is race specific and driven by perceptions of discrimination and structural racism [ 26 ].

2.6. Way 6: Indirect Effect: Case Where There Is No Relationship with an Unarmed Individual Who Has Been Killed by Police and the Effects on the Community

Racial profiling by police can have consequences on health even when there is no relationship to the person who has been racially profiled, but there is knowledge through the media and the community. When unarmed Black members of a community are killed, could it mediate adverse mental health issues within the community? Bor et al. focused on police killings and the effects on the mental health of Black Americans [ 3 ]. This study compared the mental health of Black Americans after a police killing of an unarmed Black American to the mental health before that event or 3 months after the event. The outcome variable that was measured was the number of days in the previous month that the respondent’s mental health was reported “not good” [ 3 ]. Killings of unarmed Black Americans were associated with worse mental health among other Black Americans, even if the Black Americans did not know the person who was killed, while no change occurred in White Americans. The killing of armed Black Americans was not associated with the mental health of Black or White Americans [ 3 ]. The effect of police brutality and mistreatment can be widespread and affect people who have only heard about the event [ 3 ]. This can trigger an individual to relive negative experiences causing stress and anxiety and can even cause the individual to worry about their safety and their families’ safety. Hearing about the event through the media or the community can also have adverse effects on an individual.

3. Discussion

Police violence experienced by racial minorities can cause adverse health consequences through stress, trauma, and anxiety [ 26 ]. Public health officials and policymakers need to treat racial profiling and adverse policing as true public health issues and recognize the scenarios in which medical effects can take place in Black Americans and minorities. There is a significant need to implement programs that mitigate the adverse mental health spillover caused by harmful police acts. The value of educating the public is important because Black Americans and other minorities are encountering clinical medical effects and many do not understand why [ 27 ]. We have two major recommendations. First, adequate public health resources need to be utilized to understand, diagnose, and address the health implications of racial profiling. Second, for police, while most traffic stops are lawful and do not involve racial profiling in our view, the 6 ways in which racial profiling produces medical effects will inform subsequent traffic stop interactions. We, therefore, need to educate law enforcement on the importance of Trauma Informed Policing (TIP) [ 28 ]. Trauma Informed Policing is defined as a framework for police officers to recognize and appropriately address the complexities of trauma experienced by survivors, to acknowledge symptoms and to use response tactics accordingly to prevent further individual trauma [ 28 ]. Several approaches have already been implemented in the use of trauma information such as the Trauma Informed Approach, referred to as Trauma Informed Care (TIC) which we can learn from and adopt in TIP [ 29 ]. The four Rs framework from the Trauma Informed Approach can be implemented for TIP. Officers can be trained to Realize the widespread impact of trauma and the different effects it may have on certain racial populations; Recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma; Respond by fully integrating experiences and knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; and Resist retraumatization [ 29 ]. Police officers with TIP training will have the skills to approach situations with caution and care as well as awareness that many racial ethnic groups have a history of trauma and will be able to respond to agitated people in a nonjudgmental and supportive way. Relationships with police may trigger a response based on past experiences, personal or vicarious, that are not related to a current stop triggering PTSD, trauma, or stress causing an adverse reaction at the time of the police stop. Officers with TIP training will be able to recognize trauma and approach situations safely and be aware of cultural sensitivity as well as historical trauma that may impact entire communities [ 29 ]. In sum, the major focus needs to be on reducing disparities in health and promoting a culture of health. It is imperative for police and the community to understand the dynamics of racial profiling and its effects on public health.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge support from National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH BUILD (RL5GM118969) and NIH PIONEER (DP1AR068147) for funding this work (C.T.L.).

Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed Consent Not applicable.

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Solving racial disparities in policing

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Experts say approach must be comprehensive as roots are embedded in culture

“ Unequal ” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. The first part explores the experience of people of color with the criminal justice legal system in America.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform.

This is not the first time in recent decades that high-profile police violence — from the 1991 beating of Rodney King to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 — ignited calls for change. But this time appears different. The police killings of Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May, and a string of others triggered historic, widespread marches and rallies across the nation, from small towns to major cities, drawing protesters of unprecedented diversity in race, gender, and age.

According to historians and other scholars, the problem is embedded in the story of the nation and its culture. Rooted in slavery, racial disparities in policing and police violence, they say, are sustained by systemic exclusion and discrimination, and fueled by implicit and explicit bias. Any solution clearly will require myriad new approaches to law enforcement, courts, and community involvement, and comprehensive social change driven from the bottom up and the top down.

While police reform has become a major focus, the current moment of national reckoning has widened the lens on systemic racism for many Americans. The range of issues, though less familiar to some, is well known to scholars and activists. Across Harvard, for instance, faculty members have long explored the ways inequality permeates every aspect of American life. Their research and scholarship sits at the heart of a new Gazette series starting today aimed at finding ways forward in the areas of democracy; wealth and opportunity; environment and health; and education. It begins with this first on policing.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people.

Photo by Martha Stewart

The history of racialized policing

Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad , professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School , traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people. This legacy, he believes, can still be seen in policing today. “The surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers, and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning,” he  told NPR  last year.

Slave patrols, and the slave codes they enforced, ended after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th amendment, which formally ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But Muhammad notes that former Confederate states quickly used that exception to justify new restrictions. Known as the Black codes, the various rules limited the kinds of jobs African Americans could hold, their rights to buy and own property, and even their movements.

“The genius of the former Confederate states was to say, ‘Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that’s what we’ll do.’ And that’s exactly what the Black codes set out to do. The Black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn’t criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man’s terms.” In particular, he said the Ku Klux Klan “took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people. … The Klan totally dominates the machinery of justice in the South.”

When, during what became known as the Great Migration, millions of African Americans fled the still largely agrarian South for opportunities in the thriving manufacturing centers of the North, they discovered that metropolitan police departments tended to enforce the law along racial and ethnic lines, with newcomers overseen by those who came before. “There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks whom they were focused on policing,” Muhammad said. “And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles.” And then arrived a wave of Black Southerners looking for a better life.

In his groundbreaking work, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America ,” Muhammad argues that an essential turning point came in the early 1900s amid efforts to professionalize police forces across the nation, in part by using crime statistics to guide law enforcement efforts. For the first time, Americans with European roots were grouped into one broad category, white, and set apart from the other category, Black.

Citing Muhammad’s research, Harvard historian Jill Lepore  has summarized the consequences this way : “Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

“History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful sense,” Muhammad wrote. Instead, crime statistics were “weaponized” to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people.

This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. Known as “America’s Top Cop,” Bratton led police departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles, and twice in New York, finally retiring in 2016.

Bratton rejected notions that crime was a result of social and economic forces, such as poverty, unemployment, police practices, and racism. Instead, he said in a 2017 speech, “It is about behavior.” Through most of his career, he was a proponent of statistically-based “predictive” policing — essentially placing forces in areas where crime numbers were highest, focused on the groups found there.

Bratton argued that the technology eliminated the problem of prejudice in policing, without ever questioning potential bias in the data or algorithms themselves — a significant issue given the fact that Black Americans are arrested and convicted of crimes at disproportionately higher rates than whites. This approach has led to widely discredited practices such as racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk.” And, Muhammad notes, “There is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.”

Gathering numbers

In 2015 The Washington Post began tracking every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer, using news stories, social media posts, and police reports in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. According to the newspaper, Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans, and Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Such efforts have proved useful for researchers such as economist Rajiv Sethi .

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard  Radcliffe Institute , Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, a difficult task given that data from such encounters is largely unavailable from police departments. Instead, Sethi and his team of researchers have turned to information collected by websites and news organizations including The Washington Post and The Guardian, merged with data from other sources such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Census, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Rajiv Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers,

Courtesy photo

They have found that exposure to deadly force is highest in the Mountain West and Pacific regions relative to the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states, and that racial disparities in relation to deadly force are even greater than the national numbers imply. “In the country as a whole, you’re about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you’re Black than if you are white” said Sethi. “But if you look at individual cities separately, disparities in exposure are much higher.”

Examining the characteristics associated with police departments that experience high numbers of lethal encounters is one way to better understand and address racial disparities in policing and the use of violence, Sethi said, but it’s a massive undertaking given the decentralized nature of policing in America. There are roughly 18,000 police departments in the country, and more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices, each with its own approaches to training and selection.

“They behave in very different ways, and what we’re finding in our current research is that they are very different in the degree to which they use deadly force,” said Sethi. To make real change, “You really need to focus on the agency level where organizational culture lies, where selection and training protocols have an effect, and where leadership can make a difference.”

Sethi pointed to the example of Camden, N.J., which disbanded and replaced its police force in 2013, initially in response to a budget crisis, but eventually resulting in an effort to fundamentally change the way the police engaged with the community. While there have been improvements, including greater witness cooperation, lower crime, and fewer abuse complaints, the Camden case doesn’t fit any particular narrative, said Sethi, noting that the number of officers actually increased as part of the reform. While the city is still faced with its share of problems, Sethi called its efforts to rethink policing “important models from which we can learn.”

Fighting vs. preventing crime

For many analysts, the real problem with policing in America is the fact that there is simply too much of it. “We’ve seen since the mid-1970s a dramatic increase in expenditures that are associated with expanding the criminal legal system, including personnel and the tasks we ask police to do,” said Sandra Susan Smith , Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “And at the same time we see dramatic declines in resources devoted to social welfare programs.”

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson, but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work,” said Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies.

Kris Snibble/Harvard file photo

Smith’s comment highlights a key argument embraced by many activists and experts calling for dramatic police reform: diverting resources from the police to better support community services including health care, housing, and education, and stronger economic and job opportunities. They argue that broader support for such measures will decrease the need for policing, and in turn reduce violent confrontations, particularly in over-policed, economically disadvantaged communities, and communities of color.

For Brandon Terry , that tension took the form of an ice container during his Baltimore high school chemistry final. The frozen cubes were placed in the middle of the classroom to help keep the students cool as a heat wave sent temperatures soaring. “That was their solution to the building’s lack of air conditioning,” said Terry, a Harvard assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. “Just grab an ice cube.”

Terry’s story is the kind many researchers cite to show the negative impact of underinvesting in children who will make up the future population, and instead devoting resources toward policing tactics that embrace armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and spy planes. Terry’s is also the kind of tale promoted by activists eager to defund the police, a movement begun in the late 1960s that has again gained momentum as the death toll from violent encounters mounts. A scholar of Martin Luther King Jr., Terry said the Civil Rights leader’s views on the Vietnam War are echoed in the calls of activists today who are pressing to redistribute police resources.

“King thought that the idea of spending many orders of magnitude more for an unjust war than we did for the abolition of poverty and the abolition of ghettoization was a moral travesty, and it reflected a kind of sickness at the core of our society,” said Terry. “And part of what the defund model is based upon is a similar moral criticism, that these budgets reflect priorities that we have, and our priorities are broken.”

Terry also thinks the policing debate needs to be expanded to embrace a fuller understanding of what it means for people to feel truly safe in their communities. He highlights the work of sociologist Chris Muller and Harvard’s Robert Sampson, who have studied racial disparities in exposures to lead and the connections between a child’s early exposure to the toxic metal and antisocial behavior. Various studies have shown that lead exposure in children can contribute to cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, including heightened aggression.

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson,” said Terry, “but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work.”

Policing and criminal justice system

Alexandra Natapoff , Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism.

“Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.”

Unpacking such a complicated issue requires voices from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and fields of expertise who can shine light on the problem and possible solutions, said Natapoff, who co-founded a new lecture series with HLS Professor Andrew Crespo titled “ Policing in America .”

In recent weeks the pair have hosted Zoom discussions on topics ranging from qualified immunity to the Black Lives Matter movement to police unions to the broad contours of the American penal system. The series reflects the important work being done around the country, said Natapoff, and offers people the chance to further “engage in dialogue over these over these rich, complicated, controversial issues around race and policing, and governance and democracy.”

Courts and mass incarceration

Much of Natapoff’s recent work emphasizes the hidden dangers of the nation’s misdemeanor system. In her book “ Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal ,” Natapoff shows how the practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses often sends them down a devastating path.

“This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of color disproportionately into the criminal system,” said Natapoff. “It is also the locus that overexposes Black people to police violence. The implications of this enormous net of police and prosecutorial authority around minor conduct is central to understanding many of the worst dysfunctions of our criminal system.”

One consequence is that Black and brown people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people. America has approximately 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit the Prison Policy Initiative. According to a 2018 report from the Sentencing Project, Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely.

Reducing mass incarceration requires shrinking the misdemeanor net “along all of its axes” said Natapoff, who supports a range of reforms including training police officers to both confront and arrest people less for low-level offenses, and the policies of forward-thinking prosecutors willing to “charge fewer of those offenses when police do make arrests.”

She praises the efforts of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts and George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, Calif., who have pledged to stop prosecuting a range of misdemeanor crimes such as resisting arrest, loitering, trespassing, and drug possession. “If cities and towns across the country committed to that kind of reform, that would be a profoundly meaningful change,” said Natapoff, “and it would be a big step toward shrinking our entire criminal apparatus.”

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner cites the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

Sentencing reform

Another contributing factor in mass incarceration is sentencing disparities.

A recent Harvard Law School study found that, as is true nationally, people of color are “drastically overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons.” But the report also noted that Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation ­— a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons. She points to the way the 1994 Crime Bill (legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware) ushered in much harsher drug penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. This tied the hands of judges issuing sentences and disproportionately punished people of color in the process. “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.”

The First Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill aimed at reducing racial disparities in drug sentencing and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, is just what its name implies, said Gertner.

“It reduces sentences to the merely inhumane rather than the grotesque. We still throw people in jail more than anybody else. We still resort to imprisonment, rather than thinking of other alternatives. We still resort to punishment rather than other models. None of that has really changed. I don’t deny the significance of somebody getting out of prison a year or two early, but no one should think that that’s reform.”

 Not just bad apples

Reform has long been a goal for federal leaders. Many heralded Obama-era changes aimed at eliminating racial disparities in policing and outlined in the report by The President’s Task Force on 21st Century policing. But HKS’s Smith saw them as largely symbolic. “It’s a nod to reform. But most of the reforms that are implemented in this country tend to be reforms that nibble around the edges and don’t really make much of a difference.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Smith, who cites studies suggesting a majority of Americans hold negative biases against Black and brown people, and that unconscious prejudices and stereotypes are difficult to erase.

“Experiments show that you can, in the context of a day, get people to think about race differently, and maybe even behave differently. But if you follow up, say, a week, or two weeks later, those effects are gone. We don’t know how to produce effects that are long-lasting. We invest huge amounts to implement such police reforms, but most often there’s no empirical evidence to support their efficacy.”

Even the early studies around the effectiveness of body cameras suggest the devices do little to change “officers’ patterns of behavior,” said Smith, though she cautions that researchers are still in the early stages of collecting and analyzing the data.

And though police body cameras have caught officers in unjust violence, much of the general public views the problem as anomalous.

“Despite what many people in low-income communities of color think about police officers, the broader society has a lot of respect for police and thinks if you just get rid of the bad apples, everything will be fine,” Smith added. “The problem, of course, is this is not just an issue of bad apples.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice Harvard Kennedy School.

Community-based ways forward

Still Smith sees reason for hope and possible ways forward involving a range of community-based approaches. As part of the effort to explore meaningful change, Smith, along with Christopher Winship , Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at HKS, have organized “ Reimagining Community Safety: A Program in Criminal Justice Speaker Series ” to better understand the perspectives of practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, activists, and academics engaged in public safety reform.

Some community-based safety models have yielded important results. Smith singles out the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program (known as CAHOOTS ) in Eugene, Ore., which supplements police with a community-based public safety program. When callers dial 911 they are often diverted to teams of workers trained in crisis resolution, mental health, and emergency medicine, who are better equipped to handle non-life-threatening situations. The numbers support her case. In 2017 the program received 25,000 calls, only 250 of which required police assistance. Training similar teams of specialists who don’t carry weapons to handle all traffic stops could go a long way toward ending violent police encounters, she said.

“Imagine you have those kinds of services in play,” said Smith, paired with community-based anti-violence program such as Cure Violence , which aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by using approaches health experts take to control disease, such as identifying and treating individuals and changing social norms. Together, she said, these programs “could make a huge difference.”

At Harvard Law School, students have been  studying how an alternate 911-response team  might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

The forthcoming report, compiled by two students in the HLS clinic, Billy Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, will offer officials a range of ideas for how to think about community safety that builds on existing efforts in Boston and other cities, said Viscomi.

But Smith, like others, knows community-based interventions are only part of the solution. She applauds the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Brown. The 102-page report shed light on the department’s discriminatory policing practices, including the ways police disproportionately targeted Black residents for tickets and fines to help balance the city’s budget. To fix such entrenched problems, state governments need to rethink their spending priorities and tax systems so they can provide cities and towns the financial support they need to remain debt-free, said Smith.

Rethinking the 911-response system to being one that is “more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” is part of the student-led research under the direction of Law School Professor Rachel Viscomi, who heads up the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

“Part of the solution has to be a discussion about how government is funded and how a city like Ferguson got to a place where government had so few resources that they resorted to extortion of their residents, in particular residents of color, in order to make ends meet,” she said. “We’ve learned since that Ferguson is hardly the only municipality that has struggled with funding issues and sought to address them through the oppression and repression of their politically, socially, and economically marginalized Black and Latino residents.”

Police contracts, she said, also need to be reexamined. The daughter of a “union man,” Smith said she firmly supports officers’ rights to union representation to secure fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions. But the power unions hold to structure police contracts in ways that protect officers from being disciplined for “illegal and unethical behavior” needs to be challenged, she said.

“I think it’s incredibly important for individuals to be held accountable and for those institutions in which they are embedded to hold them to account. But we routinely find that union contracts buffer individual officers from having to be accountable. We see this at the level of the Supreme Court as well, whose rulings around qualified immunity have protected law enforcement from civil suits. That needs to change.”

Other Harvard experts agree. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe last June, Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, pointed out the Court’s “expansive interpretation of qualified immunity” and called for reform that would “promote accountability.”

“This nation is devoted to freedom, to combating racial discrimination, and to making government accountable to the people,” wrote Brown-Nagin. “Legislators today, like those who passed landmark Civil Rights legislation more than 50 years ago, must take a stand for equal justice under law. Shielding police misconduct offends our fundamental values and cannot be tolerated.”

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Analyzing Police Misconduct: The Data Behind Racial Profiling

The police killings of George Floyd and other African-American civilians have generated numerous studies and policy briefs on the roots of police misconduct. But while many identify racial profiling as a driver for these tragedies, few truly understand its role in policing, much less how to eradicate it.

Alejandro Del Carmen, Associate Dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Tarleton State University in Fort Worth, Tx., believes it all comes down to the data.

An instructor in the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas, Del Carmen has spent the last two decades using data and statistical analysis to train and educate thousands of police officers, and every police chief in Texas, on proper policing practices. He has worked as a federal monitor overseeing federal consent decrees in New Orleans and Puerto Rico.

In his new book, Racial Profiling In Policing: Beyond The Basics , Del Carmen uses data, along with his expert knowledge and experience, to provide an objective and neutral basis for an in-depth discussion of race, racism and policing in America.

In a recent conversation with The Crime Report , Del Carmen discussed why a meaningful conversation on racial profiling cannot happen without first acknowledging the lived experiences of African Americans, why efforts to train police about implicit bias are often unsuccessful, and what city officials need to do if they want police departments that are sensitive to these issues.

This is an edited and abridged version of the conversation.

The Crime Report: Why did you decide to write this book?

Alejandro Del Carmen: I’ve devoted 22 years of my life to the study of racism generally and, specifically, racial profiling in policing. As a first-generation immigrant to the United States from Nicaragua who endured civil war and communism, I realized that there was a different battle going on here: a battle of racism. I kept telling myself that at least in Nicaragua I knew who the enemy was and where the bullets were coming from. But in the U.S. you really didn’t know.  You could show up somewhere and people would question what you were doing there because of the way you looked. Even as a 12- year-old, having endured what most people shouldn’t, I was intrigued by the notion that a great country like the United States, with its Constitution and all the ideals that it represents, could allow such behavior to take place.

The next question that preoccupied me, as a social scientist and criminologist, was how can we really understand this and identify it. In order to eradicate racial profiling, you have to know what it looks like. Everybody seems to know what racism in policing looks like, but very few people understand how to get rid of it, or even whether or not what they’re seeing is in fact racism. One of the questions I had to answer was how could I speak to the American people, to the consumer of information who doesn’t have a Ph.D., who doesn’t wear a badge, from a scientific perspective? That’s where the book came from. It’s an honest dialogue with the science.

TCR: The book starts off with a history lesson on racial profiling in this country. Why do you feel it is so important to understand how racial profiling actually became encoded into the DNA of our country?

ADC: We cannot understand our current state of affairs, relevant to racism, without fully understanding the history of how we got here. How can you talk about George Floyd without understanding the perspective of the African-American experience in the United States?

When I train police chiefs in Texas, I always explain that when an African-American shows up anywhere they have to write a check, they are often writing the last name of a slave owner. You cannot disinherit that reality from the African-American experience. Caucasians can afford to ignore that history. But for a person of color, particularly black people in this country, that is the reality they face every day.

Regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on, or what political agenda you follow, you cannot disinherit the reality of what African Americans went through as slaves, how they were brought here against their will, sold in town squares based on appearances and abilities, how families were torn apart, how women were raped. It made sense to inform anyone who reads this book on history first before we can even talk about racism today.

TCR: How does the culture of policing in both the past and present reflect a narrow and white-washed understanding of reality?

ADC: When you look at the history of policing, and the model that is in place right now, you have to remember that policing was organized to address crimes committed by the less-than-average citizen. They were never meant to look for the white-collar criminal. In many ways the history of policing is of a paramilitary structure established to protect the economic interests and property of the wealthy.

You can spin it and say that they have the best interests of the common folks in mind, that they address violent crime. All of that may be true, but all of that is collateral. The concept of police was to protect property and communities of propertied human beings. If you are not part of that community, then you are seen as a threat. Add to that somebody who doesn’t look like most people, who presents themselves differently, plus the fact that human beings fear what we do not know, and you end up with racism.

And this is to no fault of law enforcement personnel, but look at who the job enlisted. It enlisted individuals who were physically strong.  In New York and Boston, the Irish lined up and used law enforcement as a way to empower themselves as a minority. I have written that Hispanics have become the new Irish in America. A lot of Hispanic immigrants today have found that law enforcement is a way to not only become a citizen who is accepted by the community, but also a source of authority.

That is what the Irish did to empower themselves as people. Law enforcement became a job for blue-collar workers, who were very strong, and who wanted to empower themselves. And it had good pay and decent retirement. So, instead of a path to contribute to society, it became an avenue to get ahead while enforcing the laws of the wealthy and propertied.

Since its inception, policing has lent itself to racist tendencies. Even today, who does law enforcement attract? On one hand, really good people, but on another hand, people who don’t have the criteria of the Constitution in mind and who certainly don’t feel that equality is part of that Constitution.

TCR: Your book focuses on the need for data when tackling the issue of racial profiling. How do you police departments fail when it comes to data analysis?

ADC: When police officers tell me that they’re reviewing bodycam or dashcam videos to identify if racial profiling occurred, I often ask them what that looks like and I get a blank stare from some because they think I’m asking them the obvious. But absent a situation like Rodney King, where you have white cops beating down a black man in the street, how do you identify racial profiling when part of the equation is the intent of the officer? That’s where data comes in. Data is a substantial part of the equation, but it isn’t a cure-all resource. If I’m a medical doctor, and I were to gauge your temperature, and you’re at 100 degrees, I would not say that you’re dying from cancer or have COVID. I would have to look for other symptoms and then begin the process of deduction to figure out what you’re suffering from.

In that same way, data is an indicator. And a strong indicator. Many police departments collect data, and collect a lot of data. Some chiefs in Boston, Chicago and New York brag about how much data they collect. The calamity that I see across the U.S. is the fact that very few data points are actually reviewed and analyzed. Police departments generally collect all of this data in reports that are cosmetically friendly; they have graphics and percentages that the common consumer of data can look at and consider informative. But how can a department allow individuals like the officers that ended up killing George Floyd to go out on the street?  I guarantee that the data points are there and if somebody had been paying attention to them they could have flagged this individual and got him off the streets.

They get the data points so they can inform the public, give them a nice report, get their crime analysts to do a dog-and-pony show, but does that data become an actionable component used to direct policy, affect the way departments conduct every day operations, and affect the behavior of police officers?  We see toolsets like early warning systems, Comstat, sophisticated software programs used to fight crime, predict crime, and figure out where officers are psychologically and behaviorally; but there are still thousands of data points that are being missed.

The irony is that they spend millions of dollars on this software and no one is looking at them from a critical perspective to look for what we call patterns and practices. What happens across the department? What are some of the things we are seeing? Why is use of force utilized excessively in this area of town if the crime in that area is very low? Why is it that in minority areas there seems to be an overzealous component where more tickets are given than in other areas?

That’s where the data comes in. These are important questions that could have legitimate answers but they’re not being asked.

TCR: Where does the responsibility lie to ask these questions?

ADC: Police chiefs are responsible to city management. There are roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the U.S.. The FBI estimates about a million officers are on the streets today. Most of these agencies are in remote, rural areas and report to a small city council.

Most of the people in that council don’t have the ability to understand what is at stake. They think that the traditional role of law enforcement, to protect and serve, is the primary objective. The key is for the population and leadership of any town or city to ask their police command staff the right question: is the Constitution being adhered to? Are we engaging in best practices? Are our police officers being trained by the best sources and being held accountable for that training? Instead, what usually ends up happening is an exercise of cosmetic surgery. Cosmetically, the department has really nice uniforms, really nice patrol cars, wonderful facilities, great policies that they’ve borrowed and copied, and advanced software systems. From this perspective, the department is amazing.

But go deeper than that. What do they do with that great-looking tech and data? They have policies in place, but does the average officer understand them? A lot of police officers don’t, but they’ve signed off on them because they’ve read them. Accountability is a big word. How do you ensure that the command staff holds their troops accountable? If no one is holding the command staff accountable they’re not going to hold anyone else accountable. That dysfunctionality begins with the city leadership.

There are models out there in places where departments are beginning to understand that it’s not just what they do, but what they don’t do that needs to be addressed. That is also an issue of city leadership because they’re the ones that hire and fire the chief. Who do they hire? Is someone who looks good on paper really the best person for the job from an accountability perspective?

TCR: How do the courts often fail when it comes to utilizing data in their decisions?

ADC: There is a divide between lawyers and those of us who are data-driven scholars. When lawyers engage in a racism lawsuit, they do so from the legal basis of what’s been violated and how much money is the client consequently going to receive. For us, it’s an issue of how do we know if that violation is scientifically there.

My role is very difficult. I end up making everybody upset. I walk in a courtroom or I talk to the city counsel, and I’m either too soft on the cops or too harsh on the cops. But, at the end of the day, I say what the data actually means, not what people want to hear. For me there are always opportunities to dig deeper and find out the truth about a police officer or a police agency. The data is there. And the data is an indicator.

When people ask what the toolset is for identifying a racist cop, I tell them to look at the search data: the social media, complaints, bodycam video usage, etc. All of those components are part of the toolset that is, again, often ignored. The most difficult thing in the courts is that the judiciary looks at this from a legal perspective. Lawyers are not statisticians, they’re not the ones to look at the data, and they’re mostly advocating for a particular side or think they understand the math. But they really don’t. The judges look at the evidence, but if they don’t have a background in mathematics and don’t understand how the data plays out, they’re going to miss the point that is trying to be made.

You often find yourself in an oasis of information where either side is trying to manipulate your stance or exaggerate it and extrapolate it to use in support of their position. Then you have a judge who may insist upon fairness, but only has a certain amount of time and knowledge to perform their duties. You’re an isolated component amid these individuals who are just trying to get to the next case.

TCR: Reform efforts often emphasize new training programs. Why do you feel this can be the wrong direction to take?

ADC: Training is a reminder. You have three types of training in a law enforcement scenario: academy training that forms you as an officer, field experience training where you ride along with a superior officer who shows you what you need to do on the job, and in-service training that police receive once a year, depending on the institution they work for.

For example, the state of Texas may say that every officer in the state has to receive eight hours of implicit bias training within the next 24 months, or a local police department may say that their officers are not writing good reports so they need to do a report writing class. Training is important, not only as a source of information but also as a reminder of what officers should and should not do.

However, coming from a guy who has trained over 15,000 police officers and every chief of police in Texas for the last 22 years, if you hire the wrong person for the job there is no training in the world that is going to change that. I believe in training, but trainers can’t perform miracles. If you bring someone in who is already jaded, who is racist, and who has been brought up as a racist, someone who should never have become a cop, there is nothing I can do in training to change that person’s mindset or heart. As we continue to challenge the profession in years to come, it makes more sense for law enforcement to invest their resources into their ability to hire “trainable people” who don’t show implicit bias to an extent that can’t be addressed and fixed. I talk to significantly large agencies with 2,000 to 3,000 officers, and when I ask them how many recruiters they have, they tell me two or three.

When I ask them what kind of budget they have, they tell me not much. So, they get desperate and they lower their standards. And the less emphasis you place on a recruiting budget and recruiting strategy, the more difficult it is going to be for those trainers, whether in service or at the academy. Law enforcement loves to use the word training. If somebody does something wrong they say it’s a training issue. So, they send you off to do training, because they think somehow they can fix you that way.

In reality, training is not the answer. If you want to correct the problem, you have to go back to the roots of it. That’s why in every incident where excessive force is used, I always say not only is that a failure of training, of supervision, and a failure of the department, but also of the recruiter and the hiring process. That person should have never made it through. Period.

TCR: What is the importance of field training officers (FTOs) and sergeants in how a new officer develops?

ADC: You have a 21-year-old who goes through the academy and goes through 6-8 months of training every day for 40 hours a week. They do marches, runs, study the criminal code, self-defense, report writing, all the things that cops have to go through. Then they are given an assignment to work with a FTO, sometimes they rotate through two or three, and these officers evaluate a new officer’s performance in the field.

The idea is to incorporate your training to real-life scenarios. Are you following those thing that we taught you at the academy? One of the first things that those FTOs say is forget what you learned at the academy, I’m going to show you how to be a real cop. If that person is jaded, has been at the job for too long, doesn’t really want to be there, all of that negative behavior is going to rub off on an impressionable officer.

By the time they finish, and go on their own, you often find that whatever they learned from the FTO is what they display in their behavior. The most important rank in law enforcement structure is the sergeant. The sergeant is the hands-on supervisor who is made aware of 90 percent of what is going on with officers on the job. The captains, the deputy chiefs, the commanders, they’re doing their own thing; and, unless there’s a major incident, you’re not going to see them. That sergeant shows up when a supervisor is needed, they sign the immediate evaluations of officers, recommending them for commendations, or writing them up [for infractions]. Sometimes, those sergeants suffer from a desire of being liked by their officers and instead of being supervisors they become good buddies. When that happens, and sergeants forget their role, you begin to see that dysfunctionality, and officers begin to get away with stuff that they shouldn’t because the sergeant engages in what the Department of Justice calls deliberate indifference. They look the other way and let it happen.

TCR: Consent decrees are often used to bring broken police departments into line. What are some of the complications to the success of these mandates?

ADC: A consent decree is a last resort. It is not a quick fix or a cure all. I’ve worked in two of them. I served as federal monitor in New Orleans and Puerto Rico. It’s a very difficult process to go through. They happen when the dysfunctionality of a department has reached such levels that there needs to be some federal intervention in order for the Constitution of the United States to be the main point of that department’s police service. Some of them don’t work all the time. Some of the components of the consent decree should be adjusted. Such as how a team of federal monitors is picked.

[Former Attorney General] Jeff Sessions has said the process has become almost like a business where huge law firms are applying to become federal monitors for consent decrees with very little or no experience in policing. Just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t mean you understand how to do that job. Just because you’ve been a cop all of your life doesn’t mean you understand data. The more successful consent decrees have a mixed team of monitors with academics, criminologists, lawyers, and former police chiefs who have all had some experience.

When you have a blended team like that you end up with good results.  How do you know a consent decree is working? The absence of major issues. The absence of a shooting and various scandals that would otherwise happen if the team wasn’t in place. Often, though, you also have consent decrees where the party being sued is still fighting it.

That delays things further and costs millions of dollars. What you want in a consent decree is for a police department to be transformed so that the culture of the department is one where the unusual becomes an exception not the norm.

If somebody goes out on a limb and shoots someone for no reason it becomes a scandal as opposed to something that happens all the time. If that is the norm, you probably are in need of a consent decree because the violation of the constitution has become a standard. Flipping things around requires people to be fired, to be indicted, sometimes both, and sometimes it requires a revamping of an entire department and starting from scratch. There’s no way you’re going to do that unless you have the intervention of the federal government, and specifically the authority of a federal judge, behind you to hold that department in contempt and hold them accountable. The consent decree is only as powerful as the judges authority and their ability to do the job.

TCR: You point out that everything changed after George Floyd. What changes do you see; and is defunding the police part of it?

ADC: George Floyd changed everything because it made the average Caucasian individual in the United States entertain the possibility that police excessive use of force can be a reality. In previous incidences, when you look at the deaths of African Americans at the hands of police officers, I would always hear a caveat or a suggested context from white people to excuse why force, even lethal force, was used.

With George Floyd you see a man who is on the ground, who is gasping for air, crying out for his mother, and also saying I can’t breathe. You see all these cops around him, some with their knees on his back and head, not paying attention to what he is saying on video and nine minutes later he dies. There is no caveat. There is no excuse. This individual died at the hands of a police officer because he was accused of having a forged bill. That’s inexcusable in this country.

So, for a white individual who didn’t believe that racism is in place, didn’t believe that these things happen, the unbelievable became believable. They were introduced to the concept that this was possible and likely in this country. That’s why it changed everything. However, I don’t like the term defunding the police. The original premise of the defunding of the police was to restructure the funding and orient cops towards community policing and towards things that will save lives and improve community relations.

But if the premise or intention was ever meant to take away funding from law enforcement all together and put something else in place I don’t see it. Logically, you don’t remove resources from those individuals who need it. If you’re saying you’re going to redo the equation and reuse the resources, let’s talk about that. I’ve been in discussions nationally where people who brought that term into the equation have said they regret it because it was taken to a place that wasn’t their intention.

If it’s about reimagining law enforcement in the context of how the funding is being utilized, what the need is right now, and how we can make it a better field, those are the real questions that should be asked. Sadly, that has been lost in political debate.

Isidoro Rodriguez is a contributor to TCR.

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Racial profiling is a longstanding and deeply troubling national problem despite claims that the United States has entered a “post-racial era.” It occurs every day, in cities and towns across the country, when law enforcement and private security target people of color for humiliating and often frightening detentions, interrogations, and searches without evidence of criminal activity and based on perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Racial profiling is patently illegal, violating the U.S. Constitution’s core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Just as importantly, racial profiling is ineffective. It alienates communities from law enforcement, hinders community policing efforts, and causes law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve.

“National security” has long been used to justify the unconstitutional profiling of, and discrimination against, Muslim, Black, Brown, and other historically marginalized communities. Since September 11, 2001, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities have been discriminatorily profiled by federal law enforcement, local police, and border officers. We have also seen federal agencies use race, ethnicity, national origin, and/or religious beliefs to profile and target Asian Americans, particularly Chinese American scientists and academics.

The federal government’s encouragement of unprecedented raids on immigrant communities and workplaces by local law enforcement in cooperation with federal agencies has targeted Latine communities in particular. These policies have unjustly expanded the purview of and undermined basic trust in local law enforcement, alienated immigrant communities, and created an atmosphere of fear. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has led to a dramatic increase in hate crimes against and racial profiling of people of color.

The ACLU’s work on racial profiling encompasses major initiatives in litigation, public education, and advocacy, including lobbying for passage of data collection and anti-profiling legislation and litigating on behalf of individuals who have been victims of racial profiling by airlines, police, and government agencies.

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What Causes Racial Profiling?

By Sarah Galbenski

Published: July 31, 2018

Rufus Scales, 26 and black, was driving his younger brother Devin to his hair-cutting class in this genteel, leafy city when they heard the siren's whoop and saw the blue light in the rearview mirror of their black pickup. Two police officers pulled them over for minor infractions that included expired plates and failing to hang a flag from a load of scrap metal in the pickup's bed. But what happened next was nothing like a routine traffic stop. Uncertain whether to get out of the car, Rufus Scales said, he reached to restrain his brother from opening the door. A black officer stunned him with a Taser, he said, and a white officer yanked him from the driver's seat. Temporarily paralyzed by the shock, he said, he fell face down, and the officer dragged him across the asphalt. (LaFraniere and Lehren)

In America today, this is a narrative that we have to come to know all too well. A young black man, either guilty of simply "driving while black" or a minor infraction, is pulled over by the police, usually in an affluent, predominately white neighborhood. Upon being pulled over, the driver is treated by the officers in a cruel manner that is not commensurate with his crime. This prevalent narrative is an example of racial profiling, which is "a form of differential treatment based on an individual's racial or ethnic social identity" (Williams 401). Although racial profiling affects many sectors of American society, particularly education and employment, for the purposes of this paper, I will be focusing on racial profiling as it pertains to law enforcement proceedings. According to Brian N. Williams, associate professor of Public Administration and Policy at The University of Georgia, "Biased policing exists when an individual's race is used as an illegitimate factor for initiating police actions against the individual" (401). So, if police officers understand that it is biased and unlawful to initiate police action against an individual because of his or her race, what causes them to continue to racially profile individuals? I contend that while racial profiling can be caused by officers feeling pressured to produce crime-reducing statistics and by those in power valuing efficacy over constitutionality, it is primarily caused by officers' implicit biases. Furthermore, it is not simply caused in reaction to an "abundance" of black crime.

Williams reports that there are "a growing number of research studies that highlight the disproportionate number of traffic and pedestrian stops and searches of minorities" (402). A likely contributing factor to this racial inequity is the fact that high crime "impact zones" tend to be comprised of mostly minority residents, and, based on interviews with the New York Police Department, Andres Garcia reported that, "Trained as they are in high crime areas, and taught that they are there to bring down crime, officers feel pressured to produce numbers and statistics, and therefore engage in stop-and-frisk practices at a disproportionate rate in these impact zones," zones which are overwhelmingly inhabited by minorities. The pressure to produce is even higher for recent recruits, fresh out of the Police Academy, who are aiming to prove themselves as bona fide members of the force. Unfortunately for the minority residents of impact zones, these eager new recruits tend to have first assignments in their neighborhoods. Since officers, especially new ones, are expected to produce crime-reducing statistics in minority populated impact zones, they often resort to racial profiling as an effective means to achieve their quota.

Although racial profiling may be considered an "effective" means to identify stop-and-frisk targets and fight crime, it is in no way constitutional. In fact, "In August 2013, Federal District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the New York Police Department practice of stop-and-frisk, in which individuals are stopped for questioning and frisked for weapons, is unconstitutional because it violates the civil rights of the blacks and Latinos who are disproportionately targets of the program" (Garcia 37). Despite the unconstitutionality of the practice of stop-and-frisk due to its promotion of racial profiling, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg argued for the efficacy of stop-and-frisk and said that its practice would continue until the end of his term because he "wouldn't want to be responsible for a lot of people dying" (Garcia 38). When people in positions of power, such as Mayor Bloomberg, value efficacy over constitutionality when it comes to practices like stop-and-frisk, more occurrences of racial profiling are caused and perpetuated.

While pressure to produce crime-reducing statistics and more value placed on the efficacy than on the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk practices certainly cause racial profiling to occur, I argue that implicit biases encourage racial profiling to run rampant. Implicit biases are defined as "the stereotypes and prejudices that reside and operate in our mind outside of our conscious awareness" ("Suspect Race"). Although we may not possess awareness nor approval of our possession of these stereotypes, they are nonetheless present in our unconscious mind. As Malcolm Gladwell states in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking , "We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes…The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion" (39). In order to help us gain an understanding of our unconscious's opinions, social psychologists Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek created a series of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) designed to prove that "we make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of words that are unfamiliar to us" (Gladwell 37). The most famous of the IATs, the Race IAT, asks participants to sort both positive and negative words, such as "fabulous" and "evil" and images of white faces and black faces into their respective categories. After the participants sort words and faces separately, they are asked to associate positive words with white faces and sort them into the same category. Conversely, negative words and black faces are related during this first part of the test. For the second part of the test, the categories switch; white is now associated with negative words, and black is now associated with positive words. The results of this test state that "more than 80 percent of all those who have taken the test end up having pro-white associations, meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete answers when they are required to put good words into the "black" category than when they are required to link bad things with black people" (Gladwell 39).

In order to scientifically explain this difference in response time, scholars have found that "there's some evidence that the amygdala, a center in the brain for emotions, flashes a threat warning when it perceives people who look 'different'" (Kristof). However, despite this biological explanation, it is more likely that our biases are derived culturally. This is hypothesized because in actuality, "many African-Americans themselves have an unconscious pro-white bias" (Kristof). White people look "different" from black people, yet many black people do not experience these threat warnings when encountering an image of a white face, as evidenced by their quicker response time when associating white faces with positive words. Even though many people, including undoubtedly many African-Americans, explicitly repudiate the stereotype that associates minorities (particularly blacks) with crime, according to Jack Glaser, Berkeley social psychologist and author of Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling, this stereotype is still pervasive in our culture and media, and therefore still influences all of our unconscious biases, African-Americans' included. Applying this concept of implicit biases to policing, Glaser asserts, "When we're making decisions under uncertainty, we tend to use cognitive shortcuts. What might feel like a legitimate hunch to a police officer could actually be the influence of a racial stereotype." Furthermore, these stereotypes evoke a sense of fear in police officers, and when they are put into perceived life-threatening situations, they resort to simplistic, overzealous responses.

Yet another view that has prevailed in American society for decades is that an "abundance" of black crime justly causes racial profiling, reactionary policing, and sometimes even "necessary" forms of police brutality. However, "far from being a novel bit of truth-telling, the argument that black crime is the cause of reactionary policing is among the aged and easily refuted clichés of American racial history" (Cobb). Jelani Cobb, the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, finds it ironic that this view is mostly held by American conservatives because "the idea that the treatment of an individual hinges upon his or her demographic category flies in the face of the doctrine of individual rights central to modern conservatism." Yet this revered doctrine of individual rights still pertains to the white population of our country, for although "the white-on-white mayhem is profound" as white people are six times more likely to be murdered by a white person than a black person, "no one speaks of it in racial terms" (Dyson 149). In our country, white is the default race. And, as the Race IAT demonstrates, it is far easier for the majority of our population to implicitly (and racially) associate whites with good terms and blacks with evil ones. When a black person commits a crime against their brethren, it is immediately racially labeled. Conversely, when a white person commits the same crime against one of their own, they are not lumped in with the rest of their race but are instead treated as singular beings:

That's because the phrase white-on-white crime doesn't serve a larger ideological purpose. White-on-white crime does not jibe with the exclusive focus on a black-on-black narrative that conservatives and liberals too, have bought into. The success of that narrative depends on a few things. You had to construct the ghetto as a space of savagery that was unique to black folk…Then you had to say that any right-thinking folk wouldn't kill each other. (Dyson 149)

The cultural narrative strikes again, construing blacks as savages, portraying whites as upright citizens, and unconsciously influencing us all. Furthermore, do blacks really commit more crimes or are they simply arrested for them at higher rates? In the case of drug crimes, "blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug possession. This is despite the evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate" In fact, "from 1995 to 2005, African Americans comprised approximately 13% of drug users but 36% of drug arrests and 46% of those convicted for drug offenses" (Nellis). The absurdity of the excuse that "horrific black crime" triggers racial profiling is quite evident. Whites use drugs at the same rate. And, "white folk consistently lead all other groups in assault, larceny, illegal weapons possession, arson, and vandalism" (Dyson 149). Once again, it has been proven that indoctrinated cultural biases influence the police's perceptions on black crime. They are not solely combatting a "radical disproportion" of black crime.

In the case of Rufus Scales, it is highly probable that before the police officers even identified his minor infractions, they unconsciously associated his blackness with crime. It is important to note that they possessed this implicit bias through no fault of their own. Since this stereotype is perpetuated by our culture, both black and white officers have no choice but to be inundated with examples of this black crime association in the media and society at large. However, their hamartia, their fatal flaw, occurred when they failed to recognize that they were under the influence of a racial stereotype and proceeded to abuse Scales out of fear. Although it is important to admit that we all fall prey to implicit biases, it is absolutely paramount to recognize when our biases cloud our vision and proactively choose to act out of rationality and respect, not out of fear. Whether or not Scales was in an impact zone or under the jurisdiction of a mayor who believed in efficacy over constitutionality, he will always be subject to officers operating by implicit biases. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that officers are trained to understand implicit biases in hopes of reducing the number of occurrences of racial profiling. And, on a larger scale, it is crucial that we understand our own implicit biases so that we can be able to recognize the singularity of every human being instead of associating them with a stereotype.

Works Cited

Cobb, Jelani. "No Such Thing as Racial Profiling." The New Yorker, 4 Dec. 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/eric-garner-racial-profiling . Accessed 21 November 2017.

Dyson, Michael Eric. "Our Own Worst Enemy?" Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, St. Martin's Press, 2017, 143-169.

Garcia, Andres. "Stop-and-frisk: the policing of Latinos in New York." NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 37+. Global Issues in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A355468776/GIC?u=nd_ref&xid=87fec209 . Accessed 6 November 2017.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2005.

Glaser, Jack. "Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling." News Center: Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California Berkeley , 24 Nov. 2014, https://gspp.berkeley.edu/news/news-center/suspect-race-causes-and-consequences-of- %09racial-profiling . Accessed 6 November 2017.

Kristof, Nicholas D. "What? Me Biased?" The New York Times, 30 Oct. 2008, p. A39(L). Global Issues in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A188025544/GIC?u=nd_ref&xid=5294534d . Accessed 6 November 2017.

LaFraniere, Sharon, and Andrew W. Lehren. "The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black." The New York Times , 24 Oct. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffic-stops-driving-black.html . Accessed 6 November 2017.

Norris, Ashley. "The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prison." The Sentencing Project, 14 June 2016, http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color- of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/ . Accessed 21 November 2017.

Williams, Brian N. "Racial Profiling and Biased Policing." Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, edited by Patrick L. Mason, 2 nd ed., vol. 3, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013, pp. 401- 406. Global Issues in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX4190600368/GIC?u=nd_ref&xid=f71f76de . Accessed 6 November 2017.

• To what extent does Galbenski demonstrate fairness/evenhandedness in her argument regarding the causes of racial profiling? Are you convinced by her argument, or do you see it as a function of her own implicit bias? Point to specific evidence from the essay to support your claims.
• How does Galbenski work to establish her credibility with her reader? To what extent is she successful in doing so?
• Comment on the effectiveness of Galbenski's use of the Rufus Scales story as a framing device. What kind of response did that story invite from you as a reader?

Sarah Galbenski

E Pluribus, Pauciores (Out of Many, Fewer): Diversity and Birth Rates

65 Pages Posted: 10 Jul 2024

Umit G. Gurun

University of Texas at Dallas

David H. Solomon

Boston College - Carroll School of Management

Date Written: July 01, 2024

In the United States, local measures of racial and ethnic diversity are robustly associated with lower birth rates. A one standard deviation decrease in racial concentration (having people of many different races nearby) or increase in racial isolation (being from a numerically smaller race in that area) is associated with 0.064 and 0.044 fewer children, respectively, after controlling for many other drivers of birth rates. Racial isolation effects hold within an area and year, suggesting that they are not just proxies for omitted local characteristics. This pattern holds across racial groups, is present in different vintages of the US census data (including before the Civil War), and holds internationally. Diversity is associated with lower marriage rates and marrying later. These patterns are related to homophily (the tendency to marry people of the same race), as the effects are stronger in races that intermarry less and vary with sex differences in intermarriage. The rise in racial diversity in the US since 1970 explains 44% of the decline in birth rates during that period, and 89% of the drop since 2006.

Keywords: Diversity, Fertility, Birth Rates, Race, Homophily, Trust

JEL Classification: J11, J12, J13, J15

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

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Feds end probe of alleged CT State Police ticket scandal

Federal prosecutors have dropped an investigation into Connecticut state troopers for allegedly falsifying information on thousands of traffic stop tickets that may have skewed state racial profiling data, according to state officials.

Commissioner Ronnell Higgins of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection said the U.S. attorney's office has ended its investigation of hundreds of state troopers who allegedly submitted false traffic stop information.

“There is no federal investigation going on right now,” he said.

Gov. Ned Lamont said the decision vindicates an earlier state finding that only a few troopers were involved.

“There were a lot of unsubstantiated allegations about our state troopers,” he said. “I think the investigation does us proud.”

“It speaks to the integrity of our state police. The overall majority every day try to go out there and do the right thing. There are six of seven bad apples, and we are going to hold them accountable," he said.

Six troopers and one constable remain on administrative leave pending the conclusion of a department review of their conduct, according to Higgins.

Federal authorities launched their probe a year ago after state investigations exposed discrepancies in police traffic stop reports to the state racial profiling board.