Three members of advocacy group Race Matters, Friends spoke at Monday’s Columbia City Council meeting about implicit bias in local policing.

“There are disproportionate rates of searches of African-American drivers [in Columbia],” Race Matters, Friends member Tara Warne-Griggs said. “But the rates of finding contraband are much lower for African-American drivers than they are for white drivers.”

Warne-Griggs spoke about meetings taking place between the organization and members of the Columbia Police Department command staff regarding vehicle stops. She said the first meeting with CPD was “a little rocky.”

“They have been willing to acknowledge that there are disparities in the data that they report to the attorney general’s office,” Warne-Griggs said. “They have not, however, been willing to say that those mean anything about their practices of policing.”

Warne-Griggs said there have been some positive steps, specifically CPD investigating individual officers who are have been accused of biased policing.

“Right now, we have the kind of environment in which implicit bias can result in trauma and death for people of color,” Race Matters, Friends member Rachel Taylor said.

CPD Public Information Officer Bryana Larimer declined to comment on how the department handles issues of racial bias by its officers, but confirmed that members of the command staff have been meeting with Race Matters, Friends.

Larimer also said CPD will be holding a fair and impartial policing training session open to all community members at 10 a.m. Nov. 5 at the Daniel Boone City Building. She said this is the same training given to all CPD officers.

Taylor shared statistics to illustrate that people of color are about twice as likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.

[According to the Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/), 762 people have been shot and killed by police in 2016. Black people accounted for 188 of those those deaths, or about 25 percent. Taylor said that according to U.S. Census data, black people account for only 13 percent of the population.

“Police brutality is a very a real and present problem, and it affects how people of color feel here in Columbia,” Taylor said. “There are positive changes, but unsurprisingly, we need more.”

Finally, Race Matters, Friends member Stephen Kleekamp urged the city to get more involved with the issue of traffic stops by police.

He shared a story of two black men who were stopped and had their IDs checked because the officer said a tail light was out. Kleekamp said the tail light was fully functional before and after the traffic stop.

“I’m a little afraid that some of the steps taken recently are inadequate, and I don’t think they’re really serious efforts to deal with these issues,” Kleekamp said.

_Edited by Bailey Sampson | bsampson@themaneater.com_