Two-thirds of people banned from BART are black — and agency isn’t asking why

An Oakland police officer walks past the newest Bart train before its inaugural ride Friday, Jan. 19, 2018 at MacArthur Station in Oakland, Calif. An Oakland police officer walks past the newest Bart train before its inaugural ride Friday, Jan. 19, 2018 at MacArthur Station in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Two-thirds of people banned from BART are black — and agency isn’t asking why 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Two-thirds of the people BART banished from its property last year were black, and a committee the agency set up to monitor potential civil rights violations in the unique exclusion program isn’t scrutinizing the racial disparity.

BART banned more people from the system in 2017 than in previous years in an effort to protect riders and employees. Agency officials say the use of these prohibition orders — which last from one month to a year — has paid off.

The program, though, is booting black people from trains and stations at far higher rates than others, raising concerns about racial profiling.

Of the 315 people barred from the Bay Area’s backbone transit system last year, 209, or 66 percent, were identified by police officers as black, according to BART data. Fifteen percent were identified as white and 12.5 percent as Latino.

A 2015 BART survey of weekday customers, the latest available, found that 12 percent were black, 44 percent were white, 23 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 18 percent were Hispanic.

A BART spokeswoman, Alicia Trost, said police bias played no part in the racial disparity in prohibition orders, which are issued after people are accused of committing certain crimes on the rails.

Those caught violating an order — whether they are spotted by police or station agents, or discovered to be on the banned list after being detained for another reason — are arrested and face up to six months in jail.

“BART police respond to calls for service without regard to race, age or gender,” Trost said. Police Chief Carlos Rojas, she said, “takes seriously the concerns from the community about these trends and is committed to continuing to implement best practices and equitable law enforcement.”

But retired Judge LaDoris Cordell, who formerly served as independent police auditor for the city of San Jose, said the disparity suggested a pattern of possible racial profiling that must be publicly examined.

“I just think the data is alarming on its face and demands an explanation from BART,” Cordell said. “If you’ve had this data for three years, what are you doing about it? Are you comfortable with it?

“This also says something to black men,” she said. “It would make me very wary of riding BART.”

Racial disparities in the criminal justice system have gained increased attention in recent years, and BART has been far from alone in attracting scrutiny.

A Chronicle examination of Oakland police data found that from September 2014 to September 2015, about 70 percent of people stopped in that city because of officers’ “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity were black, even though 26.5 percent of Oakland residents were African American.

A similar review of records in San Francisco found that from 2013 to 2015, black motorists were eight times more likely to be searched with their consent than white drivers during a traffic stop. For searches in which officers invoked reasonable suspicion, black drivers were searched at a rate more than four times higher than white drivers.

Across California, police officers are now required to collect demographic information on those they stop, an effort to study the issue.

At the same time, advocates and police officials have raised concern that civilians who report crimes and suspicious behavior to police harbor bias. And there are other potential factors underlying large racial disparities, including that BART put extra patrols last year in East Oakland — where the black population is higher — in response to a surge of robberies.

The racial disparities on BART reflect other agency data. Fifty-three percent of people arrested on BART last year were black, records show. And a report recently released by the agency showed that among the 340 people on whom police reported using force in 2017, black people made up 66 percent.

Black people made up 61 percent of those prohibited from BART in 2016, 65 percent in 2015 and 61 percent in 2014.

Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle BART Police Chief Carlos Rojas talks about first quarter crime...

BART’s independent police auditor, Russell Bloom, said his office had not reviewed the figures on prohibition orders. But he said he planned to follow up with Chief Rojas after the upcoming release of a report on BART by UCLA’s Center for Policing Equity, which is seeking to “diagnose racial bias in policing” across the country.

BART provided the center with data on police arrests and stops, but not on the prohibition orders, officials said.

“The racial disparities reflected in (BART police) data raise important questions related to bias-based policing and/or racial profiling and a deeper analysis of the numbers is absolutely warranted,” Bloom wrote in a statement.

Lorie Fridell, a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa who has trained BART officers on avoiding bias, said racial disparities in enforcement do not necessarily prove discrimination. But, she said, more and more research has shown that bias is often “implicit” as people allow themselves to act on stereotype-confirming generalizations.

“If we have an implicit association in our head between black and crime, which is actually quite pervasive, their attention might be drawn to people of color more than it would by misbehavior being caused by people of other races,” Fridell said.

Trost, the BART spokeswoman, said the agency has committed itself to fighting police bias, training officers in what is known as “fair and impartial policing” and establishing “layers of oversight including a Citizen Review Board, an independent police auditor and officer-worn cameras, among other progressive reforms.”

BART began issuing prohibition orders after the 2011 passage of AB716, a state law that also includes transit agencies in Sacramento and Fresno. The measure required BART to establish a five-member committee of volunteers to monitor how prohibition orders are issued.

Trost said the Transit Security Advisory Committee assists BART in complying with California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, legislation enacted in 1959 outlawing discrimination based on such factors as gender and race. BART documents state that the committee’s job is the “planning and execution of the exclusion policy.”

But committee member Janet Abelson, a former mayor of El Cerrito, said in an interview that she did not recall the committee discussing the racial disparity in prohibition orders during its monthly meetings. She said, “I wasn’t even aware that the number was that high.

“We are in charge of one specific thing — writing a report to the Legislature — not the whole field of antidiscrimination,” she said. “The BART Board of Directors is in charge of that.”

The Transit Security Advisory Committee’s latest report about the exclusion policy to the state Legislature, dated Feb. 27, includes the racial breakdown of prohibition orders in 2017 but offers neither comment nor scrutiny. The 48-page report states only that the “age, race and gender statistics remained relatively constant over the past three years.”

Abelson said the committee focused on security and public safety issues, including fare evasion and attacks on BART station agents and others.

“It’s very scary to ride BART in a number of ways right now,” Abelson said. “By that, I mean I fear for my safety.”

BART issues prohibition orders based on a variety of offenses, and those targeted can contest an order and receive an administrative hearing. A conviction in court is not required; an arrest is sufficient. More alleged misdemeanor offenses (61 percent) led to riders getting kicked out than felonies (31 percent) last year, records show.

For suspected infractions such as defacing property or urinating in public, a person must be cited on at least three occasions within 90 days to be banned. But for more serious alleged crimes, the ban can take effect after the first arrest.

The top offenses resulting in a ban, records show, were battering or threatening other patrons (23.5 percent), battering or threatening an officer (13 percent), and domestic battery (12 percent).

BART’s 315 prohibition orders in 2017 were a 15 percent increase from 2016 and a 24 percent jump from 2015. Thirty-one percent of the orders went to people age 18 to 25. The orders most commonly stemmed from offenses at West Oakland Station and Powell Street Station in San Francisco, followed by Hayward Station and Lake Merritt and Coliseum stations in Oakland, records show.

Trost said the orders have done well in deterring violent or repeat offenders from committing crime on the BART system.

“Our data shows that 94 percent of those who get prohibition orders adhere” to them, she said. “This shows the system is a safer place with prohibition orders.”

Ted Andersen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tandersen@sfchronicle.com