The quarterly report by Northeastern University shows that the police are still searching vehicles driven by blacks and Hispanics more often than those driven by whites.

01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, March 29, 2005

BY BRUCE LANDIS
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Rhode Island police are still treating blacks and Hispanics more harshly than whites when they enforce the law on the road, the first report of a new racial profiling study shows.

The report, released yesterday, says that the police are still searching vehicles driven by blacks and Hispanics more than twice as often as those driven by whites.

"We're disappointed," said Warwick Police Chief Stephen McCartney, speaking for the R.I. Police Chiefs Association. He said the police have been working to reduce disparities, and that he finds the results "troubling."

Civil-rights advocates said that they were disappointed but not surprised. They said they were troubled that more progress hasn't been made since a previous study began reporting similar findings three years ago.

"Apparently, very little of consequence has changed," said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and a regular critic of police practices. He said the report showed, "There is still widespread racial profiling" by Rhode Island police.

To some extent, the police agreed.

McCartney said the chiefs have "put a lot of hard work" into addressing the findings of the previous study, but that "It would appear that the disparities are still there."

He said that the state's police departments have worked to train their officers -- "we've certainly done enough training" -- but that yesterday's report "would seem to show we still have the same issues."

"I'm not sure what we can say right now," McCartney said, but he said the chiefs will continue to work to make changes.

However, Toby Ayers, a spokeswoman for the Civil Rights Round Table, a group that pushed hard for state legislation against racial profiling, said she was encouraged by the fact that the police chiefs immediately sought a meeting with her group to discuss the report.

The report's summary warned that the data is preliminary. As far as it went, the report was largely consistent with previous results. Among its conclusions:

"Once stopped, black and Hispanic drivers were disproportionately more likely to experience searches than white, Asian or Native American drivers," it said. Statewide, 7 percent of black and 6.2 percent of Hispanic drivers were searched, compared with only 2.9 percent of white drivers.

In a new element, the study found that black and Hispanic drivers were also disproportionately more likely to be frisked after they were stopped than white and other drivers.

The police found contraband in 30 percent of vehicles driven by blacks, 27 percent of those driven by whites, and 23.5 percent of those driven by Hispanics.

Yesterday's report did not address a major element of the first study, whether minority group members continue to be stopped disproportionately in addition to being searched more often. That is a more complicated analysis than vehicle searches because it requires an estimate of the racial breakdown of the driving population.

The last study included such estimates, but McCartney said the chiefs questioned Northeastern University's intention to use the same estimates again because they might be outdated.

The Northeastern faculty members working on the new study could not be reached yesterday. But the report summary said that further analysis is needed "to understand if racial disparity exists in traffic stops."

Accusations from Rhode Island minority group members that the police discriminate against them on the highway go back years. Suggestions from state police data that they might be right eventually prompted the General Assembly in 2000 to mandate the first study, done by the same group of experts from Northeastern University.

That two-year study found that the police disproportionately stopped or searched cars driven by minority group members in more than half the state's cities and towns.

The legislature then tightened the laws against discriminatory policing and mandated another, one-year study that is now going on. Yesterday's was the first report from the new study, and covered the first three months' data, from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, 2004.

That included data cards that officers from 38 city and town departments and the state police filled out during 64,467 traffic stops.

Brown, of the ACLU, sharply criticized the police. Yesterday's report, he said, suggests that the police haven't used the data from the previous study "to make meaningful corrections in their practices."

The report said that 10 percent of the data cards were missing information. Brown said that showed that the police aren't even interested enough to collect the data properly.

McCartney, meanwhile, said he wondered whether the frequency of frisks of minority group members might stem from fear on the part of police officers about their safety. He said he wondered if an officer might look at "a car full of black males and say, 'I need to frisk them for my [own] protection.' "

Do police officers see black males to be more threatening than white males?

"That's a question," he said, adding that he wonders if "that's what's causing this disparity."