By Matt Stout, Antonio Planas
Boston Herald
BOSTON — Blacks are more likely to be stopped and frisked by Hub cops in a “problematic pattern” that stops short of “widespread” racial profiling, according to the researcher whose findings the ACLU cited in an explosive report on Boston police tactics.
“I can’t explain why these racial patterns exist ... but it’s clear there are problematic patterns,” said Anthony Braga, the Rutgers criminologist and Harvard fellow whose analysis of more than 204,000 so-called “civilian-police encounters” in Boston between 2007 and 2010 was the basis of yesterday’s American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts report that accused the Boston Police Department of “racially biased policing.”
Braga noted that blacks were 8 percent more likely to be involved in a police encounter multiple times and 12 percent more likely to be stopped and frisked. But he said the stat heavily cited by the ACLU — that blacks make up 63 percent of the encounters, but only 24 percent of the population — is a “misrepresentation” of whether there really is a racial bias.
“The context of policing is not what’s going on with New York with stop and frisk,” Braga, a former BPD policy adviser, said, noting that of the 204,739 reports analyzed, only 40 percent include instances of stop-and-frisk. “There is a problem, and the problem needs to be understood. It’s a mixed bag. But the ACLU portrayal of the report ... doesn’t represent the spirit of what we’ve done.”
The ACLU report sparked an immediate firestorm yesterday, with police brass saying it was outdated and ignored recent reforms in training. The police department said the findings show that cops are targeting gang members in “high-crime areas.”
Cops are also repeatedly stopping those with criminal records or “gang membership,” according to police, who say just 5 percent of the individuals stopped accounted for 40 percent of the total reports.
Police Commissioner William B. Evans said that the use of the type of police report the ACLU studied has dropped 42 percent between 2008 and last year, though officials said they did not have a racial breakdown of who was stopped during that period.
“We aren’t out there stopping every African-American child for no reason at all,” Evans said. “We put most of our officers, like we did this summer ... into the areas where we see the gun violence. And unfortunately that is where most of that is populated by African-American young males. It’s only reasonable to believe that we’re going to stop and talk to more black males than any other part of the city.”
In making recommended changes, including adding body cameras to police, the ACLU said that in 75 percent of reports, Boston police described the reason for the encounter as simply “investigate person” — a description it assailed as “because I said so.”
“The findings confirm what many people from communities of color have long suspected: Boston police officers targeted people of color at far greater rates than white people,” the ACLU report states.
While Mayor Martin J. Walsh noted the findings precede his administration, he also said he wasn’t challenging them.
“I’m trying to build a city here. My theme in the campaign was ‘One city.’ And having certain neighborhoods targeted or certain individuals targeted inappropriately isn’t the way I want to do it,” he told the Herald.
“If I’m a young black male and I see this report, certainly I see this as targeting me. I see the sensitivity and the concern in the black community and the communities of color. The numbers speak for themselves. It’s what you do with the numbers.”
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