© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
An update has been released for the Android version of the WAMC App that addresses performance issues. Please check the Google Play Store to download and update to the latest version.

Police Accountability Series Part One: A Look At Vermont’s Work To Assess Racial Inequalities

Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo
Pat Bradley/WAMC
Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo

The Washington Post has been tallying the number of individuals shot and killed by police since 2015. The data for 2018 show 899 people shot and killed as of October 1st.  The national newspaper is not the only organization tracking law enforcement actions and breaking down racial, gender and causal data. Officials in Vermont are also studying racial disparities in law enforcement activities. In this first part of our weeklong series on police accountability, WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley looks at how Vermont is trying to assess, analyze and fix racial inequalities in policing.

Vermont is one of the whitest states in the country, according to the U.S. Census: it has a residency rate of 94 percent white, 1 percent Asian, 1 percent African American, 1 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent other races.  

In 2017, University of Vermont Professor of Economics Stephanie Seguino and Cornell University Visiting Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning Nancy Brooks issued "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Traffic Stops: Analysis of Vermont State Police Data 2010-2015.” It showed that black and Hispanic drivers in Vermont were more likely than white drivers to be stopped and searched by state and local police but less likely to be found with contraband.  After some questions were raised about the study’s methodology, an update called "A Deeper Dive into Racial Disparities in Policing in Vermont” was issued in March 2018. It confirmed the earlier data.  
The authors also issued a third report: "Driving While Black and Brown in Vermont." Professor Seguino:  “It started about eight or nine years ago with the emergence of a group called Uncommon Alliance. It was the community of color that was very concerned about experiences that they had with the police. And the Burlington and area police departments agreed to join the community of color in this group called Uncommon Alliance to try to figure out what was going on and how the problems could be addressed. So initially they were the first to collect data in Vermont before it was actually legislatively mandated.”

The state legislature mandated in 2014 that all law enforcement agencies collect data from traffic stops in order to track racial disparities.  Seguino found stark patterns in her analysis of the data.  “What was striking about it was we used several different indicators and in almost all of those indicators we found racial disparities of the same kind: that blacks and Hispanics were disproportionately stopped, arrested and searched compared to white and Asian drivers.”
Bradley: “What the data can’t necessarily tell you is why. What’s been done to figure that out?”
Seguino: “That’s a really great question. Police agencies, law enforcement in particular at least some of them if not many of them, are having a hard time accepting that there are racial disparities. You can only tell whether they’re justified or unjustified by digging more deeply and looking at your department’s practices and training people around implicit bias and so forth. That work is being done to some extent in Burlington and more extensively at the Vermont State Police.  I have not seen many departments using the data internally. And yet the real benefit of these data is they are a tool for management to hold their own officers accountable, to have conversations with them, to try to understand what’s going on internally. So I have not seen that practice adopted widely yet in Vermont. There’s still as I said extreme discomfort with the fact that there are even findings of racial disparities in the data and I think there’s an unwillingness to accept that.”

The ACLU of Vermont has taken on a number of cases arising from racial profiling incidents.  Staff Attorney Lia Ernst says the Seguino studies prove that officers are stopping people of color disproportionately.  “Perhaps even more alarming is the discretionary decisions they make after a stop.  We’re seeing that people of color are searched far more frequently than are white people and those searches overall are tending to be less likely to uncover contraband, which indicates that officers are making decisions to search that aren’t based on reliable predictors of criminal activity. And when we see that those disparities are so clear with respect to race it would certainly appear that some form of racial profiling or bias is at play.”

The Vermont State Police and Burlington City Police are the two largest law enforcement agencies in Vermont. Both have embraced the collection and analysis of profiling data.  In 2016, Seguino penned a separate report: “Analysis of Racial Disparities in Traffic Policing: Burlington Police Department 2012-15.”  In an interview with WAMC, Burlington Chief Brandon del Pozo says the data provides a wealth of information that can help – or hinder – a department’s impartial policing.  “When you look at a car stop you have the reason for stopping the car or not. You have the reason for issuing a ticket or not. You have the reason for conducting a search or not. Then you have the history of the police officer and his or her accomplishments and tendencies. Then you have the history of the driver and his or her license status. There’s a lot of data packed into that and then it’s happening thousands of times a year. So in order to really gain insight you have to be very data driven.”

While Del Pozo has brought in national experts like Morehouse University Professor Dr. Bryant Marks to provide bias training, he says it’s not a panacea.  “You’ve got to be aware of it and you can’t let it affect your decision making to the extent that’s possible. But you also have to design systems that account for it and check it and make sure that the outcome is as fair as possible. So it’s not just about the acts and choices of the officer but about the systems that officers work in such as the criminal justice system writ large.”

In 2017, the Vermont Legislature passed Act 54, mandating the creation of a Racial Disparities in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice System Advisory Panel.  Among its requirements are that the state Attorney General, the Human Rights Commission and other stakeholders develop strategies to address racial disparities within state agencies. Assistant Attorney General David Scherr, a member of the panel and co-chief of the new Community Justice Division, notes that while there are legislative requirements to obtain police stop data, there are also concerns about what’s being collected.  “There are concerns that some departments aren’t collecting the data that they should be collecting or are reporting in an incomplete manner. Another issue is that we could be collecting more data. For example the Vermont State Police collect Use of Force data. That’s not required for all departments around the state and there’s been discussion that all departments should be required to collect Use of Force data and to report on that publically. So I think that is a couple of the areas that people are looking at saying that we need to do better on the mandated data collection and we should be mandating more and the picture that we have while it’s useful is not a complete picture.”

Scherr adds that the police data collection also points to a need to assess the entire criminal justice system for bias.  “The data has showed that almost zero non-white individuals have been found with the hard drugs that we're really worried about. So it's quite clear that the police side of things deserve scrutiny and those practices need to be observed and hopefully corrected.  But that’s not the only place the problem exists because there’s a lot of other people who make decisions. We’ve got a lot of focus on the police, which is appropriate. That scrutiny is necessary. We need to do more. We need to look at the system more broadly.”

The ACLU’s Lia Ernst agrees that a better base of data is needed and as more data is compiled there will be a better sense of whether bias incidents are increasing or decreasing.  "We've been fighting for this for years and the analysis of the stop data lays down a marker and says this can really show what is happening in the day-to-day decisions of  various actors in the criminal justice system and it's something that other actors in the system should be taking seriously."

I’m Pat Bradley WAMC News.