The Bias-Free Coalition turned its focus to data analysis in its second meeting Tuesday at the Daniel Boone City Building.
Columbia Police Department data analyst Jerry East explained how the police used the data on vehicle stops in 2010 to identify racial problems. He said this was the first time for the department to look into certain statistics.
“What the AG requires us to collect is a good amount of data to start with, but that doesn’t give you the whole picture,” East said. “So, what we try to come up with is that we should break down the data.”
The numbers were broken down by location, officer grouping and time. According to East, most stops are clustered in the downtown area at night, regardless of race.
According to the presentation, the highest disparity index for black drivers was clustered in the southwest area following Scott Boulevard.
But East said that the stops were not based on race.
“The only reason why we made that number of traffic stops in that area was because of construction, and that’s why the number ballooned,” East said.
East also broke down the number of disparity index based on officer grouping by the number of stops made by officers. Among the 280 officers, 37 officers made 70 percent of the total stops of African-American drivers, according to the presentation.
“A lot of officers with a higher disparity index for the race of African-American work in the African-American neighborhood,” East said.
East said even though the police department is statistically unbiased, he believed there was still an issue of racial profiling.
“This data doesn’t say if we are or we aren’t racially profiling because there is not enough fact within the data to say if we are or not,” East said. “We are convinced that we are not doing enough collection of data.”
East said one of the things CPD will look into is those officers who do not work in predominantly black neighborhoods.
“Extra pieces of information should be collected before the police department can really do research on individual basis,” East said.
Another thing the police department will look at is the accountability of calls for service.
“We are talking about beat accountability,” CPD Police Chief Ken Burton said. “What we are trying to do is to get the officers to stay in their assigned beat.”
Burton said a lot of young police officers tend to work in areas with more activity. He said the police department is working on guaranteeing that the city has equal police coverage.
Bias-Free Coalition secretary Don Love said the search rate for black drivers is three times than that of white drivers.
East said though there was a higher percentage of black drivers in searches, more data is needed to determine if racial biases are an issue.
Burton said the goal of the coalition is to build trust between the police department and the community and become a model for the state.
“Columbia can get a handful of real opportunities for a model program for the other agencies to follow and perhaps a guidance for legislation and policy changing at the same level,” Love said.