Pubdate: Tue, 2 Oct 2007
Source: Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
Copyright: 2007 The Oregonian
Contact:  http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/324
Author: Andy Dworkin, The Oregonian Staff
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?217 (Drug-Free Zones)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/racial+profiling
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?246 (Policing - United States)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption - United States)

POLICE TRY TO SOLVE ARRESTS DISPARITY

Drug-Free Zones - Hidden Bias Is Among the Ideas Floated for Why More 
Blacks Were Cited

A vexing mystery faces Portland police: Why did they ban African 
Americans from the city's defunct drug-free zones more often than 
whites or Latinos?

The drug-free zones, which faded into oblivion Sunday, lost key 
political support last week when a report showed that police did not 
equally issue exclusion notices, which bar people arrested or cited 
on drug accusations from returning to the zones where the alleged 
crimes happened.

More than two-thirds -- 68.2 percent -- of the African Americans 
arrested got exclusion notices. That compares with 53.5 percent of 
the non-Latino whites arrested and 46.4 percent of Latinos arrested.

"Pretty obviously, there was racial disparity in the numbers. That's 
a huge concern," Police Chief Rosie Sizer said.

The numbers don't explain how that disparity came to be. But Portland 
officials have hypotheses ranging from hidden bias to inadequate 
training for police patrolling the most recently created East zone, 
which ran along 82nd Avenue.

Mayor Tom Potter commissioned the report by consultant John Campbell. 
Potter said the difference in arrests could share roots with "racial 
profiling," the concept that police stop and question minorities more 
often than they do whites. The mayor has started a committee to study 
whether Portland has a racial profiling problem, how bad it is and 
how to address it.

Defense lawyer Chris O'Connor, who fought the drug-free law for 
years, said he doubts the system intended to discriminate against 
African Americans. But it did so, and he urged the racial profiling 
committee to look at why. He also said the next step should be to 
study whether African Americans are targeted unfairly for drug 
arrests: More than half the people arrested in the zones were African 
Americans, who make up about 8 percent of the Portland population.

But many police officers strongly deny they target suspects by race, 
and say African Americans are arrested more because they commit more 
drug crimes. The Portland Police Association union issued a statement 
Monday saying "there is no evidence that Portland Police have 
disproportionately applied the law to any racial group, and no 
evidence that the use of the law in any particular instance has been 
inappropriate."

Sizer said "unintentional racial bias" could drive the disparity, but 
she doubted it -- police generally dislike drug criminals, she said, 
and would be unlikely to give some a break because they were white.

Sizer and other officers wondered whether other differences in the 
data are driving the racial imbalance. People arrested on 
methamphetamine accusations were mostly white and much less likely to 
get exclusions than suspected cocaine users and dealers, who were 
mostly African Americans, the report indicated. Officers who used the 
law less often were more likely to apply it disproportionately. And 
the law was used least in the meth-heavy East zone, which had the 
biggest racial imbalance; there was no racial imbalance in the North 
zone, which covers Portland's traditionally African American neighborhood.

To Sizer, that suggests that officers in the East zone didn't get 
enough guidance on using the law. "We don't think, in retrospect, 
that we appropriately trained it" there, she said.

The imbalance also may reflect that many meth arrests are made as 
officers investigate other crimes, such as car thefts, so they might 
not think about exclusions.

And unlink crack cocaine, Sizer said, meth is more often dealt in 
private houses or by arranged phone meetings, situations where it's 
easy to avoid drug-free zone exclusions. So officers might have found 
exclusions a less useful tool for meth crimes than crack crimes, she said.
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