Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 1 April 2005 — Page 2

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PAGE A2 RACISM ► Continued from Page 1 warrantless searches. “This accounts for why so many minority citizens can recount a story of being stopped for nothing more than the color of their skin,” Cole says. “For all practical purposes, they simply do not enjoy the same constitutional protections that white citizens do.” There appear to be no studies that have attempted to measure racial bias in Indiana police activity. However, there are a number of individual cases suggesting Hoosiers are not exempt from the phenomenon consistently documented in other states. In recent years, the Indiana Civil Liberties Union has successfully litigated cases involving systematic racial profiling by the Indianapolis Police Department and the City of Carmel Police Department, including suits alleging profiling on the streets of Carmel and the Circle Centre Mall which resulted in financial settlements and promises for systemic reform. In the African-American communities of Indiana, anecdotal allegations of racial bias in local law enforcement abound. For example, Daniel Winston who works both as a licensed private investigator and as a security guard at Hyatt Regency Hotel, feels he was a victim of

racial profiling. On the evening of April 24 of last year, Winston and his fiancee Nickole Griffin, both African American, finished their shift at the Hyatt at 10 p.m. and picked up their children, ages 10, 9 and 3, from the babysitter. While they were heading east on 21st Street and stopped at an intersection with Ritter Avenue, an Indianapolis Police Department car made a left turn in front of them. “The officer made eye contact with me and gave me a strange look,” Winston says. “I just had a feeling and I said to my fiancee, ‘They’re getting ready to pull us over.’ My fiancee says, ‘Why would they do that? We haven’t done anything.’” Eventually the IPD officer, who they later learned was named Thomas Westrick, said he had pulled over Griffin and Winston because he had received a radio call that a blue Ford had been seen with an adult female and a juvenile female in the car with a gun. Winston and Griffin were in a green Kia with three children in the back seat. After the police officer released them without any ticket or charges. Winston and Griffin filed a complaint with the Indianapolis Citizen Complaint Review Board, and gave taped statements to an

investigator. A few weeks later, they received a letter saying the officer’s behavior that evening “conforms to departmental policy.” Officer Westrick did not respond to repeated requests, delivered through an IPD spokesperson, seeking his comment on Winston’s and Griffin’s account. We can’t ignore complaints Indianapolis Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Stephen Staletovich flatly disputes any suggestion that IPD officers engage in racially biased policing tactics. “That is absolutely ridiculous,”he says. “You wouldn’t find officers agreeing to do such a thing. Someone would stop and say, ‘This is wrong and we’re not doing it.’” Staletovich says that the majority of the department’s felony drug arrests stem from neighborhood complaints of drug dealing. IPD logged nearly 6,000 such complaints in 2004, and he says IPD’s vigorous response to those complaints has helped reduce the homicide rate in the city. “It think it is unfair to ignore the social issues involved,” Staletovich says. “Instead of assuming the cops are biased, isn’t it possible they are just doing their jobs? If we get

complaints on African Americans, we can’t just ignore that.” But Charles Moose is among those who say racial profiling is a reality in policing both in Indiana and across the country. Moose was the police chief of Montgomery County, Maryland and Portland, Ore., before that. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Criminology, but he is best known for catching the “D.C. Snipers” who terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for three weeks in October of 2002. Now Moose works to address racial profiling through organizations includingthe American Civil Liberties Union. “The statistics across the country certainly show the same kind of bias that the Marion County court figures suggest,” Moose says. “Police are just people, and they can be influenced by stereotypes or prejudice. But it is also a matter of rewards being given throughout the law enforcement system and in our communities for making these kinds of stops and arrests. It’s not just the drugs. African Americans are associated with a different level of violence, and so the perception is that arresting them for drugs will also address the violence.” There are two problems with this type of race-influenced

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policing, Moose says. The first is the bias that leads to African Americans being massively overrepresented in the country’s prisons and jails. In the 2000 Indiana Census, African Americans made up 8.4 percent of the state’s population, but almost 3 8 percent of the incarcerated population. “History shows us that there are three bad things that have happened to African Americans: the first was slavery, the second was discrimination, and the third is bad policing,” he says. Other legal experts have noted that nearly all of the riots in the US. since the mid-20th century had their origins in race-sensitive policecitizen disputes. Although IPD arrests many more African Americans than whites, countywide figures show whites account for 72.5 percent of the persons issued traffic tickets. IPD, like most Indiana law enforcement agencies, does not collect demographic information for all the individuals they stop or pull over, nor do they report the racial breakdown of whom they choose to search. Several AfricanAmerican community leaders, including state Rep. William Crawford, D-Indianapolis, and the civil rights organization Concerned Clergy, arejoiningwiththe ICLU to review legislation that would require law enforcement agencies to better track who they stop and search. Collecting such accurate data is critical, these community leaders say, if some white citizens are going to be persuaded that the problem exists, and the police are going to be persuaded to correct it. The ACLU is among a broad coalition supporting the End Racial Profiling Act, introduced in both the US. House and Senate in the last Congress and expected to be reintroduced soon. The proposed legislation would define racial profiling, institute data collection systems to identify and track

racial profiling, and make grants available to police departments for in-car video cameras, police training and portable computer systems. The data is likely to reveal further evidence that the relationship between race and criminal justice is as complex as it is dysfunctional. Increasingly, urban police departments are led by African Americans, like Indianapolis’ Director of Public Safety Robert Turner and Marion County Sheriff Frank Anderson, who oversee white majority forces spending a disproportionate amount of law enforcement resources in minority neighborhoods. As IPD spokesman Staletovich says, “A lot of our officers are assigned to areas where pretty much the only people they could pull over are African American.” Chief Moose is among those supporting the federal legislation and thinks state laws are needed as well, saying that reporting accurate police stop and search data is necessary if communities in Indiana - and throughout the country -are goingto move toward a method of law enforcement that truly addresses the problems of drug addiction and crime, rather than continue the perpetual Drug Court cycle of African-American men and women placed in chains for non-violent crimes. “The strategy we are using is not successful, so you wonder why we are doing it,” Moose says. “Isn’t doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result the definition of insanity?” Fran Quigley and Jacqueline Ayers are the executive and associate directors, respectively, of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, www.iclu.org, and Elizabeth Stull completed an internship with the ICLU in the course of earning her master’s in social work degreefrom Indiana University.

Legislator of the year

The Hospitality and Tourism Industry recently selected Rep. Carolene Mays, D-Indianapolis, publisher and general manager of The Indianapolis Recorder, as legislator of the year. Pictured left to right during the event at the Hyatt Regency are guest speaker Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman, honoree Mays and John Livengood, president of the Indiana Hotel and Lodging Association. (Photo/C. Guynn)

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