Dan Horn

dhorn@enquirer.com

Police in Cincinnati's suburbs are about two and a half times more likely to arrest African-Americans than people of other races. That's roughly the same disparity as in the rest of the country, a USA TODAY and Enquirer analysis has found.

The difference in some communities, though, is far more dramatic. African-Americans are almost 12 times more likely to be arrested in Sharonville, seven times more likely in Norwood, and five and a half times more likely in Reading and Blue Ash.

All of those communities – and more than a dozen here overall – have arrest disparities greater than in Ferguson, Missouri, where residents say anger over arrests of African-Americans contributed to riots this summer after police fatally shot an unarmed black man. The disparities are about more than race, however, and their meaning can vary from community to community. Location, demographics, crime patterns, economics, education and the nature of police work all are part of the equation that determines who gets arrested and where that arrest occurs.

"There are many variables that can affect the numbers," said Norwood Police Chief William Kramer.

A community's racial makeup, for example, might skew the disparity because the number of black arrests is measured against the size of the black population. A predominantly white city, such as Reading, Norwood or Sharonville, could have a higher rate of black arrests because it borders communities with large African-American populations.

To some, though, the meaning of the numbers is clear: Race matters in the criminal justice system, and skin color plays a part in whether someone who encounters police goes home or goes to jail. Civil rights activists say higher arrest rates are part of a broader inequity that also sends a larger share of African-Americans to court on serious charges and, ultimately, to prison.

"These disparities are real, dramatic and unacceptable," said Al Gerhardstein, a civil rights lawyer in Cincinnati. "This is not a new issue. It's an issue we haven't been able to solve."

COMPARE ARREST RATES

Police say that kind of criticism is unfair and carries a bias of its own against law enforcement. If the rate of black arrests is out of whack, they say, it's not because of racial discrimination. They say police arrest criminals – not black suspects or white suspects – and that improvements in training and hiring practices over the years have reduced the risk of discrimination.

"Every time I take an action, I have to ask myself, 'Why am I doing this? How can I justify the action I'm taking?' " said Lt. Steve Schueler, operations commander with the Blue Ash Police Department. "If you can't justify it, you don't do it."

Some communities, such as Cincinnati, aren't included in the analysis because it's based on arrest figures that were voluntarily reported to the FBI in 2011 and 2012.

Others, including Sharonville and Norwood, dispute the data, saying it unfairly depicts the work they do and does not include all of their arrests, most notably traffic offenses. Norwood police say their disparity rate would fall from 7.2 to 6.4 if all arrests were included, and Sharonville officials say theirs would drop by as much as half.

"Just spouting these numbers off makes it sound like something's wrong," said Sharonville Mayor Kevin Hardman. "I don't think that's what's happening."

Still, on any given day, African-Americans in thousands of communities across the country are more likely to be arrested than whites for drug possession, assault, burglary, drunken driving and a host of other crimes tracked in the FBI data. The national median for arrest disparity is 2.6, meaning police arrest blacks 2.6 times as often as people of other races. In Ferguson, it's three times as often.

Ferguson is not an outlier. More than a dozen communities in Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky – and hundreds more nationwide – have an arrest disparity greater than Ferguson's.

"It doesn't mean that police are discriminating," said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert on racial profiling, "but it does mean it's worth looking at. It means you might have a problem and you need to pay attention."

Arrest rates stir upold, ugly argument

The difference in black and white arrest rates is the starting point for one of the most contentious and sometimes ugly debates in America today. African-Americans, who make up about 14 percent of the U.S. population, are charged with a larger share of crimes than the rest of the population, about 28 percent of all criminal offenses in 2012.

The simplest explanation is that African-Americans are arrested more often because they commit a disproportionate number of crimes, but civil rights activists, policing experts and even some in law enforcement say it's more complicated than that. Annual surveys on drug use, for example, have consistently found that whites use illegal drugs at rates equal to or greater than African-Americans, and yet the proportion of blacks arrested for drug crimes is considerably higher.

Those who have studied arrest rates say many factors may influence them, from overt racism and racial profiling to a lack of economic opportunities to a stronger police presence in predominantly black neighborhoods.

The latter argument goes something like this: If law enforcement is more aggressive, either through stop-and-frisk tactics or traffic patrols, then police will catch more crime and make more arrests. Some civil rights advocates say that's especially true for drug crimes, which accounted for 1.2 million arrests nationwide in 2012.

"Are there racist cops out there? Of course. But by and large, I don't think that's what we're talking about," said David Singleton, executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center in Cincinnati. "For the most part, we're talking about good officers who want to do their jobs, but the focus is on African-American neighborhoods."

Police say they sometimes find themselves in a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't situation when it comes to patrols and tactics. If crime is a bigger problem in a neighborhood that happens to be predominantly black, they say, it would be irresponsible not to step up enforcement. If they do, though, they're more likely to make arrests for minor crimes, such as drug possession, that they're missing in other neighborhoods.

In Springfield Township, where African-Americans are almost four times more likely to be arrested, police spend a disproportionate amount of time in a small number of black neighborhoods. Police Chief David Heimpold said that's because residents there call more often for help.

"A lot of those arrests that get made are the result of complaints from other African-Americans," Heimpold said. "It's not that anybody is biased or racially profiling. It's just that that's who's calling."

Once police officers are in those neighborhoods, he said, "they see other things, and that can lead to additional arrests."

Singleton said those additional arrests, even though they're not driven by racial bias, tend to boost a racial disparity in arrests in poor, black neighborhoods, where police cast a wider net than in other neighborhoods. "All kinds of drugs are being done by kids in Indian Hill, but you won't see police stopping them and engaging them for the purpose of seeing if they're committing crimes," he said.

Police work to avoidperception of bias

Geography also may drive up the number of black arrests in some communities. Norwood and Reading both have black populations of about 7 percent, but they border neighborhoods and cities with much higher black populations. Since criminals don't care about municipal borders, those communities actually police a more diverse population than their Census figures might suggest.

"I look at these numbers, and I don't want to have that perception of our department," said Scott Snow, Reading's police chief. "Our numbers can be somewhat skewed. We get a lot of people from outside our community."

Large numbers of commuters and proximity to highways also are factors in places such as Norwood, Blue Ash and Sharonville. Tens of thousands of non-residents pour into those cities every weekday to work in office parks, stores, restaurants and other businesses.

Norwood police say they checked their records and found their disparity rate falls to 2.3 when only arrests of Norwood residents are counted. "We're not just dealing with our citizens," said Lt. Ron Murphy, Norwood's police spokesman. "It's not a true reflection."

Hardman said many of Sharonville's arrests, including almost 25 percent of black arrests, involve non-residents. He said almost 20 percent of black arrests take place in the city's many hotels.

"These aren't people who live in Sharonville," Hardman said. "We sit right on Interstate 75. It's a major drug corridor. We have individuals who use our facilities for criminal activity."

While individual communities may be able to explain, at least to some extent, their disproportionate rate of arrests, Gerhardstein said those explanations don't answer all the questions about those arrests. The big one, he said, is why blacks nationwide are 2.6 times more likely than whites to be arrested regardless of where they live.

Gerhardstein said the first step is getting past the rhetoric often associated with conversations about race and studying what's really going on.

"Let's gather these statistics, and let's talk about them," he said. "We aren't even doing that on a regular basis."

USA TODAY and reporter Brad Heath contributed.