If the Columbia Police Department merged with the Boone County Sheriff's Department, it would mean more aggressive law enforcement, Sheriff Dwayne Carey said in a recent radio interview in which he also belittled the work of Columbia's community outreach unit, dismissed data on racial disparities in traffic stops as unimportant and cited questionable statistics to suggest "young black males" are responsible for most violent and drug crimes in the area.

As he sees it, Carey said, the idea presented by Presiding Commissioner Dan Atwill for consolidating law enforcement would put policing in the county's unincorporated areas and the county's largest city under an elected sheriff instead of a chief appointed by elected officials or the Columbia City Manager. In the Jan. 10 interview hosted by Southern District Commissioner Fred Parry on 93.9 the Eagle, the sheriff referred to the plan as an “absorption” of the police department where he would be in control.

“It’s not a bad idea,” Carey said. “I will tell you, when you talk about merging with Columbia Police Department, I know Dan’s not talking about being under a… I think what Dan’s talking about is absorbing the Columbia Police Department and still having the elected official sheriff that is voted in or voted out by the voters. The absorption would be bringing the Columbia Police Department into like a county police and having the sheriff oversee all of that.”

The city needs aggressive law enforcement, not the community-oriented policing mandated by Columbia City Council resolutions, Carey said. Under his direction, he said, officers would double up in patrol cars and stop people they “know” are committing crimes and conduct lots of drug searches in the city.

When Parry asked whether those actions would increase Carey's already high racial disparity index for vehicle stops, he said what some call evidence of racial profiling is actually “problem oriented policing.” Carey then alluded to the areas he considers problematic, which are predominantly minority and low income neighborhoods.

The Missouri Attorney General annually collects and reports data on vehicle stops to measure whether minority drivers are being stopped at higher rates than white drivers. The racial disparity index in the report compares the rate of stops for each minority group against their share of the driving-age population. An index of 1.0 or less indicates the percentage of stops is at or below the population share for that group.

In 2000, the Boone County Sheriff’s Department vehicle stops showed a racial disparity index of 1. Carey was elected in 2004 and in that year the racial disparity index was 1.65. Over the past 13 years, that statistic has increased steadily. For 2017, the most recent year in the data, the index was 3.50, indicating black motorists were about four times more likely to be pulled over than whites.

“So be it,” Carey said responding to the increased disparity index. “The problem is people are so consumed with this racial profiling data that has to go down to the attorney general. I call it criminal profiling, problem-oriented policing. You know if you take an area like Demaret Drive where we are having a lot of problems out there, if you are making a lot of car stops in that area because of the problems, because of the shootings, because of the drugs and that neighborhood is predominantly African-American, you are going to have more African-American stops there.”

The Tribune asked Carey for an interview to clarify and explain his remarks but he declined. Atwill and Parry did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Parry, in the interview, called the sheriff’s perspective “refreshing” and dismissed criticism of the Columbia police as an unfair attack, adding he believes there is also a similar national trend.

“You know our police department in Columbia has been under attack,” Parry said. “Very unfairly I will tell you, by a lot of people. Now there are some things that obviously deserve some critique but it seems like to me police officers, law enforcement, in general are under attack throughout this country. But how would you deal with the political environment in Columbia?”

In response, Carey, mirroring statements by former Police Chief Ken Burton prior to his departure, said officers of the Columbia police want to do “law enforcement work." He added a dig at the community outreach unit, whose work has been lauded as highly successful, saying police officers should not be barbecue chefs.

“Law enforcement is not designed to go out and flip burgers at a neighborhood barbecue. We are not designed to go out and mow somebody’s grass,” Carey said. “You don’t have to do that to establish rapport with your community. In fact, in Boone County, Columbia included, I would bet the majority of citizens are looking for us to protect and serve keep them safe and get the bad guys off the street.”

The council has stated emphatically that the aggressive policing described by Carey is not what the people of Columbia want, Mayor Brian Treece said in an interview Friday.

“That is not what our community has told us they want our police department to look like,” Treece said. “We have had a two-year long community engagement process to transform our police department with some significant culture change and the opportunity for a new chief of police in Columbia to implement those changes are what the council is focused on.”

Treece has opposed the idea of merger, instead backing more collaboration between county and city law enforcement, to improve on the work the agencies do together on a daily basis. The Columbia Police Department should not be under county authority, he said.

“They work with their partners at the county or MUPD to solve crimes every day,” Treece said. “If anything we could enhance that at the command staff, but I don't think we want to wholesale convey or contract our municipal law enforcement function to a single entity.”

During the program, a caller identified as Ken took issue with Carey's focus on minority and lower income neighborhoods as the greatest areas of crime as well as his pitch for more aggressive policing. Carey said Columbia police data, which could not be confirmed at press time, shows 95 percent of violence in the city is perpetrated by black men involved in the drug trade.

"And again, it doesn't get back to black or white, but the problem is if you're focused on the drug trade, which I disagree with him on, when I talk about gun violence and 95 percent of the violence was the question earlier that you had Fred," Carey said. "In Columbia, I have been told that 95 percent of that violence is involved in the drug trade, and it's also directly involved with young black males."

If correct, that statement means crime in Columbia is far different from national trends. A U.S. Department of Justice report show 52 percent of homicide offenders between 1980 and 2008 were black and 45 percent were white. A report on non-fatal violent crime in 2017 shows that 66.8 percent of offenders committing crimes such as forcible rape, aggravated assault and voluntary manslaughter were white.

The victims of violence are almost always members of the same race as the perpetrator, except for hate crimes, which are committed at a vastly higher proportion by whites than blacks, 50 percent versus 21 percent in 2017, according to FBI statistics.

Multiple studies show a contributing factor in the over representation of blacks in drug crimes is caused by racial bias in law enforcement and over policing of minority neighborhoods. The American Civil Liberties Union in 2013 issued a report indicating while drug use was equally prevalent among both blacks and whites, blacks were more than three times likely to be arrested for it.

Parry asked Carey about his statistics on local crime.

"Alright, but that's not hearsay, when you say you've been told, you're being told by people who know. People who are involved with it on a daily basis," Parry says to the sheriff.

"Yeah, so that number is factual," Carey said. "Now it might be 96 percent now, or it could be 93 percent. But when I was given that information a couple of years ago, it was at 95 percent. And I would say it's still somewhere in that neighborhood if not up a little bit."

Social and justice equality group Race Matters, Friends president Traci Wilson-Kleekamp on Friday said Carey's comments show he does not possess the cultural awareness needed to enforce laws in one of the state’s most diverse and progressive cities.

"The sheriff has a very simplistic approach to policing," Wilson-Kleekamp said. "He is unschooled on the myriad intersectionalities relating to people of color, under-served communities and appears to have little interest in learning and possibly fine tuning the methods of his agency to a more comprehensive and collaborative approach."

A merger of the two agencies would be disastrous, Wilson-Kleekamp said, pointed to the recent resignation of Burton in the wake of his reluctance to embrace community-oriented policing.

"The role of a police agency head is to police according to the wishes of the community he serves," Wilson-Kleekamp said. "The department or agency belongs to the people — it’s not Carey’s personal playground, it is outrageous that Carey could be the putative head of the city department given his Jurassic mindset demonstrates very clearly that he would be unqualified and completely insensitive to any kind of collaborative approach as is mandated direction by city leadership."

The county's push for merger is likely about money, Treece said. The Columbia Police allocated budget is almost twice the sheriff’s — $23.3 million versus $13.3 million.

“I would probably says it’s about money, that they would like to be able to capture all public safety spending right now in one system,” Treece said. "I would rather we focus on how we get the best results out of the public safety dollars that we have."

ppratt@columbiatribune.com

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