By Chris O’Donnell
Tampa Tribune
TAMPA, Fla. — Black bicycle riders in Tampa were disproportionately ticketed by Tampa Police in a well-meaning, but ineffective effort to reduce overall crime, the Department of Justice concluded in a report released Tuesday.
While welcomed by many residents of crime-ridden neighborhoods, the Tampa Police Department’s bicycle citation practices didn’t accomplish the department’s additional stated goals of increasing safety and lowering bicycle thefts, according to the report, which found no civil rights violations.
The report by the department’s office of Community Oriented Policing Services concluded that there was no discriminatory intent or racial animus by officers, but the high rate of bicycle citations “burdened” the city’s black population in the name of helping the community.
The COPS office was invited by Mayor Bob Buckhorn and then-police Chief Jane Castor a year ago to examine the bicycle citation practices after the Tampa Bay Times uncovered racial disparities.
Buckhorn on Tuesday welcomed the report and pledged to implement its suggestions. But he refused the chance to apologize to those who may have been harmed by the police practices.
“I’m never going to apologize for being aggressive in crime fighting,” Buckhorn said. “It’s just not going to happen.” Buckhorn asserted that the majority of residents in the affected neighborhoods appreciated the police tactics.
“I don’t think it warrants an apology, but I do think it warrants corrective action,” the mayor said. “This was not a discriminatory practice. This was a practice that was driven with the best of intentions.”
According to the report, 73 percent of riders stopped between Jan. 1, 2014 and Aug. 30, 2015 were black and 26 percent were white, while the estimated population of riders during the period was 40 percent black and 49 percent white.
The racial disparities, the report said, cannot be explained by differences in bicycle ridership or manner of bicycle riding.
Still, U.S. Attorney Lee Bentley called TPD a “model department” that should be lauded for voluntarily addressing the issue and agreeing to the report’s recommendations, at a time when other law enforcement agencies around the country are facing more aggressive civil rights actions from the Justice Department. “The city is doing exactly what we would expect it to do,” Bentley said.
The report made several recommendations, many having to do with keeping better data and analyzing it to make policy decisions, as well as more training for officers and involvement of citizen advisors.
The report also called for “continued and constant department-wide focus on treating all individuals with dignity and respect.”
Further, the report suggested more community outreach, clear explanations of policies and what residents can expect from officers.
By implementing the recommendations, which officials pledged to do, COPS Director Ronald Davis said, “Tampa can be the model. We can really show the country the value of data analysis. So yes, we have racial disparities. Yes, what the department thought they were doing turned out not to be the case. There is no justification for these racial disparities and yes, changes must occur.”
Tampa Police Chief Eric Ward said the recommendations in the report “will only make us better...This is something we’re looking forward to.”
Ward said the department has already “dismantled and rebuilt” some of its processes. So now, when officers’ performances are evaluated, they are given more credit for efforts to help the community and less for their numbers of arrests and citations.
Ward said police are also being “more strategic” in their work by targeting enforcement at specific individuals who are known offenders. “That’s probably why you see the numbers go down in our bike stops,” he said.
Tampa City Councilwoman Lisa Montelione, who attended the news conference in which the report was released, said the city should organize a community meeting to present the COPS report and allow citizens to weigh in on how they feel.
Montelione said the city does owe an apology to residents in poor neighborhoods who were cited by police for misdemeanor bicycle infractions. “I would offer an apology,” she said. “Anytime someone feels they were wrongly accused of something they are owed an apology.”
Councilman Frank Reddick, Tampa’s only black councilman, said in a phone interview that it is significant that the report recognizes the disproportionate treatment felt by black residents and that the program didn’t reduce crime.
“What’s important now is the administration takes these recommendations and moves forward,” he said. “I’m hopeful the mayor will reach out to the black community and send a positive signal that these type of actions will not take place in the future.”
Even if there was no intent from police officers to target black residents, the outcome was that black residents were more likely to be cited, said Tim Heberlein, political director with Organize Now, a Florida non-profit that campaigns for social justice. The community will want to see that the city adopts the DOJ recommendations fully, he said.
“We see this as an opportunity to have tough conversations with TPD and community members to build better practices,” he said.
Outside the U.S. Attorney’s Office, about 10 activists stood on Tampa Street unfurling a large Black Lives Matter banner and chanting for fairer treatment of the black community from police.
The group included members of Tampa for Justice, the group that began pushing for a police oversight board with power to subpoena police officers and conduct independent investigations of alleged police wrongdoing.
Buckhorn did create a new review board but its role is largely limited to conducting reviews of internal investigations carried out by the police department’s internal affairs bureau.
Connie Burton, an activist in the black community, said the police only stopped issuing bicycle citations because the practice came to light. She said there is still distrust of the police in predominantly black neighborhoods.
“It’s a pattern of practice that African American people are under attack in this community,” she said. “The fact that the mayor refuses to apologize after hearing the report shows his lack of political leadership to be a progressive thinker.”
The report described both positive and negative reactions to the citations from residents: “Community members expressed concerns about the high volume of stolen bicycles in Tampa and the problems associated with people using stolen bicycles to commit crimes,” the report said. “Community members commented that they feel young people on bicycles are the source of a great deal of neighborhood trouble, along with several alleging that they see bicyclists selling drugs and calling for police intervention.”
Some citizens, it added, said police “are responding to the need for continued and constant focus on reducing crime in high-crime, violent neighborhoods. Similarly, citizens echoed the sentiment among police that a criminal element uses bicycles to move drugs into these neighborhoods.”
Residents and business owners in those areas “welcomed and wanted police attention there,” the report says, and “recognize the challenges and dangers police face and are concerned for their welfare.”
On the other side were general negative perceptions of police conduct that weren’t directly related to bicycle citations.
Some people told the investigators that at times, “police can be disrespectful, heavy-handed and even dehumanizing in their interactions with the public...There is a feeling that there may be unwritten rules and policies of the TPD that support discrimination, including department culture and its focus on statistics. It was suggested that racial tensions in general have been ‘bubbling’ under the surface for some time and that there is widespread, general resentment of the TPD in the older black community, which is affecting the younger generation as well.”
In addition, the report says, multiple people mentioned bicycle issues, including that the general public doesn’t know the laws relating to bicycles. Others thought it was “unfair to have onus upon the rider of a bicycle to prove it is not stolen.”
The report said there was a strong correlation with high-crime areas and higher numbers of bicycle stops. But still, the data showed the stops didn’t significantly reduce crime.
The report noted that the number of bicycle citations dropped precipitously after the racial disparities were reported last year. So, investigators compared crime rates before and after the drop to determine whether the citations had an impact.
“Crime did not vary significantly before and after the story came out,” said Ojmarrh Mitchell, a University of South Florida criminology professor who worked on the report. “There was a 4 percent increase in (serious) crimes after” the drop in citations. This, Mitchell said, was “not statistically significant. In statistical terms, the crime rates are identical before and after.”
Consequently, Mitchell said, the COPS investigators concluded that the bicycle citations had not reduced overall crime rates.
Regarding the stated goal of increasing bicycle safety, the report concluded that the areas of the city with the highest number of bicycle crashes were not the ones with the highest numbers of bicycle stops. And neighborhoods with the highest numbers of stolen bicycles had only slightly higher numbers of bicycle stops.
Copyright 2016 the Tampa Tribune