Advocacy group uses data to police the police on race

Try typing in OpenDataPolicing.com.

When a blue computer screen appears, click on “Search NC.” Maryland and Illinois are the only other options.

Now here is what’s at your fingertips: Data on nearly 20 million traffic stops since the start of 2002.

After entering Asheville Police Department as the "agency of choice” and sifting through a wealth of information, you’ll find figures for categories such as types of stops and searches by race.

Eighteen percent of all traffic stops, for example, involved black drivers even though black people make up 13 percent of the city’s population. Also, black drivers were 100 percent more likely to be searched than were white drivers.

Though similar figures have been published before, two things are most important for the people who created and maintain the website, which is generating attention in Asheville. Everyone should have all types of data at their fingertips if they want to help hold government accountable. And, in Asheville, police should continue to examine how they approach law enforcement when it comes to race.

“Traffic stops are the most common way that citizens interact with police officers, so it’s important that we understand as much as we can about the various dynamics at play,” said Ian Mance, a staff attorney with Social Coalition for Racial Justice, a civil rights nonprofit based in North Carolina.

“This site enables anyone who engages with these issues – whether they be police chiefs, courts, lawyers, or policymakers – to ground their conversation in the facts,” said Mance, who gave a presentation on the website in Asheville last week.

Opendatapolicing.com launched in December 2015 and is the first data tool of its kind to use public records to publish up-to-date stop, search and use-of-force data broken down by race and ethnicity, he said. It is updated monthly.

Police departments statewide have been required to submit data on traffic stops to the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation since 1999, Mance said. But the data was tough to access in an easy and meaningful way.

Mance presented the information to about 30 people at the NAACP Racial Coalition's Lunch + Learn in Asheville, an event organized by Dee Williams, chairwoman of the NAACP's Criminal Justice Committee. The NAACP partnered with Code for Asheville, a volunteer organization dedicated to making government work for people through the powers of technology and community collaboration.

Mance's presentation was an educational opportunity to show community members the tool exists and offers the ability to examine racial disparities in APD traffic stops, Williams said.

"This traffic data is a window to the soul of the Asheville Police Department and any police department," Williams said. "It's a starting point to see the culture and treatment of police departments as it pertains to different segments of the population."

Three Asheville police officers, a City Council member and representatives from about 10 different community organizations also attended the meeting.

"This is the beginning to start a dialogue helping bring (the Asheville Police Department) into the 21st century," Williams said. "APD is no more atypical than any other department in the U.S. We see there is a problem and it is up to the citizens to identify the problem.”

What does data show?

In Asheville, past stops indicate black drivers are far more likely to be searched than white drivers, even though they are no more likely to have contraband.

Over the past 15 years, a black driver stopped for speeding was 230 percent more likely than a white driver to be searched, the data shows.

APD relies on drivers' consent to conduct searches, and these searches disproportionately impact black drivers, who account for up to 40 percent of drivers searched annually.

Over the past five years, 56 percent of APD's reported searches have been conducted after a motorist granted consent, which is higher than other departments around the state.

For example, 3 percent of Fayetteville Police Department traffic-based searches were based on a motorist's grant of consent last year. In Durham, 13 percent of traffic-based searches were based on a motorist's consent. In Concord, the city closest to Asheville's size, the figure was 21 percent.

Compared to other cities of similar size, including Concord, Gastonia, Greenville, High Point and Wilmington, Asheville has persistent racial stop and search disparities, but they are less pronounced.

APD has reported an unprecedented drop in searches citywide over the past five years, according to data. The city has cut its search rate by 83 percent over that period.

APD reported 7,400 traffic stops compared to Concord's 21,000 in 2015, despite almost identical populations. Jacksonville, which has 21,000 fewer people than Asheville, reported more than twice as many traffic stops as APD over the last five years.

Additionally, of seven comparably sized cities, only Gastonia reported a stop rate lower than Asheville.

Asheville Police Chief Tammy Hooper met with Mance earlier this month to review his findings. She suggested the reason APD has fewer reported traffic stops could be a result related to problematic radar detectors or some other factors.

Hooper added that the department regularly audits the data to ensure compliance by officers.

How other cities used data

Since the website's launch, community organizers, police executives and defense attorneys have used the data to find racial disparity trends within a specific law enforcement agency and create change, Mance said.

Within Durham, where Mance began his campaign, the data revealed police had a systemic and institutional problem, he said.

"It was not just a matter of a couple bad apples. It was a matter of who was being employed and where they were being deployed," he said.

The numbers showed over the last decade and a half, a black driver stopped in Durham for not wearing a seat belt was 206 percent more likely to have their car searched than a white driver stopped for the same cause.

When researchers eliminated the top third group of officers responsible for generating the most race-oriented stops and looked at other factors, they reached the same conclusion. Black drivers were being stopped more frequently than white motorists, Mance said.

"With this data in hand, organizers in Durham paired personal stories with empirical data and went to City Council," Mance said. "(They) asked for a formal investigation," which was completed from 2013-14.

The investigation concluded Durham Police Department had been engaging in a practice of racial profiling.

As a result, the department made policy changes including requiring officers obtain written consent before searching a vehicle, requiring police to conduct frequent audits on individual officers and requiring police to present City Council with a quarterly report detailing traffic stop reports by race.

Consent searches dropped 75 percent and searches overall declined by 14 percent as a result of the changes.

Some departmental changes have not been brought to light by community organizers or by looking at data first.

A defense attorney in Orange County, the Chapel Hill area, had a 57-year-old Hispanic client who had been stopped by a deputy for a reported safe movement violation and upon searching his car the officer found 3 pounds of methamphetamine. The defendant was facing a mandatory 23-year prison sentence.

The incident was captured on video and the attorney saw no movement of the car like the deputy reported, which prompted the firm to dig into traffic stop data.

For four consecutive years, this Orange County sheriff's deputy searched as many or more Hispanics as he searched non-Hispanics, according to data. When searching, the deputy found contraband historically on 1 percent of Hispanics and 17 percent of non-Hispanics.

The information was taken to the district attorney, who dismissed the case and released the defendant. The findings also led to serious discussions within the Sheriff's Office, Mance said.

"How is it that we have deputies that for years on end can be stopping and searching people at such a high rate and never finding anything and no one ever notice?" he asked.

Change in Asheville

Activists like Williams and Rich Lee, who also attended the presentation, hope community members, city officials and police will take advantage of the data tool and work together.

All three policies that Mance said Durham officials implemented were no-cost solutions. These could be adapted in Asheville, or perhaps there is a better solution that fits the city, he said.

Fayetteville and Greensboro police departments, for example, have prohibited or placed less emphasis on regulatory and equipment-based traffic stops known to disproportionately affect black motorists.

For Lee, there is no reason these policies shouldn't be implemented in Asheville and he hopes they will be.

"Our goal should always be, in anything we look at whether it is housing or jobs or anything, how do we eliminate disparity? How do we make sure that anyone in our community is treated equally?" he said.

"I think (these policies) are a great no-controversy way to start," he said. "They are free (and) they have no safety implications. It's not a question of implementing them but it's a question of should we do this free, easy thing that is proven to work or should we do even more free things? It's not harder. We should do all of them and we should have a good honest discussion in the departments about how to work it."

But implementing policies shouldn't be where it stops.

"Statewide about half of all police interactions are traffic, car or driver interactions, but what if we have a city where most of the city or black population walks?" Lee said. "Then there is a large amount of interactions that are not being captured in this data. As a person who looks at data, I want to make sure we have the clearest picture we can and we see it for what it is."

Additionally, officers are only required by state law to report the city or county where a stop was made, but not an exact geographical location, such as a specific address or neighborhood. But Patrick Conant, owner of PRC Applications and a member of Code for Asheville, would like to see the information made public.

"It would be incredibly helpful if they would proactively release information related to the geographic location of traffic stops, so we can analyze traffic stop data at the neighborhood level," he said.

This data would allow community members to determine if a department-wide trend is consistent across different neighborhoods, Conant said.

Letting people know the data exists creates opportunities to change the culture of the police department, Williams said.

"We hope to convince City Council and the police department that we've got work to do," she said.

Mance will give a condensed presentation on this data tool at the Citizen Police Advisory Committee at 5 p.m. Wednesday at the Public Works Building, 161 S. Charlotte St.

To view his entire presentation online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lhtV254G8A&feature=youtu.be.