One of my best friends, Katie, is an attorney at ACLU Louisiana. They recently did a study on racial disparity and arrests in Orleans and surrounding parishes. The results are astounding and yet not surprising. We don't just need to fix buildings in New Orleans, people!! We need to fix the way we treat each other. This city would be in much better shape if we worked together more instead of judging and fighting one another. We're all New Orleanians, we're all people. We should strive for so much more than just rebuilding, we should also strive for equality.
As a great man once (sort of) said...
A city divided against itself cannot stand!!!
From the Times Pic....
Report studies race in arrests
It sees disparity with parish populations
Thursday, August 07, 2008
By Jeff Adelson
Minorities make up 16 percent of the population in St. Tammany Parish, but they represent 31 percent of those arrested in the unincorporated areas in the first quarter of 2007, according to a three-parish study by the ACLU, which says racial profiling remains a problem in Louisiana.
The report, which studied arrests in St. Tammany, Avoyelles and De Soto parishes, calls for increased oversight of traffic stops to monitor and prevent any racial profiling throughout the state.
"The findings continue to show that racial profiling continues to be a problem," said Liza Grote, who is working on a racial justice fellowship for the organization. "The current state of the law is not getting done what needs to get done, which is racially blind policing tactics."
But the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office, which patrols the unincorporated areas of the parish, disputed the report's conclusions, arguing that more study is needed to determine whether the disparity is caused by racial motivations or other factors.
"We target people based on criminal behavior, not on the color of their skin," Maj. Fred Oswald said.
In Slidell, with a 22 percent minority population, about 34 percent of those arrested were minorities. Covington's population is made up of about 27 percent minorities, but minorities made up about 41 percent of those arrested.
Slidell Police Chief Freddy Drennan said Wednesday that he does not condone racial profiling nor does he believe it exists in his department.
"We teach (about) racial profiling in our academy and have done so since 2002," he said. "It is something that we're 100 percent compliant on. That is something that is mandatory and that they have to have before they graduate from the academy."
A Covington police spokesman said the department had not seen the study and would have no immediate comment on it.
Mandeville Police, patrolling a city with a 10 percent minority population, reported that about 11 percent of those arrested were minorities.
The study by the ACLU's Louisiana chapter took arrest data from agencies in the three parishes and compared the rate at which minorities are jailed to the percentage of minority residents in each parish. Information on arrests comes from the first three months of 2007, according to the report. The parishes were chosen to show a spectrum of rural and urban areas and based on complaints from residents, Grote said.
Grote described the practice of racial profiling as being "ineffective policing in addition to being unconstitutional."
Because of a loophole in Louisiana law, few agencies report statistics on traffic stops, preventing the ACLU from analyzing these directly, Grote said. As a result, the organization focused on arrest data in an effort to spur reform and require greater transparency on police procedures, she said.
Better policies would help "law enforcement officers be more cognizant of their actions and think more about what they're doing when they're stopping people," Grote said.
In Avoyelles Parish, 39 percent of those arrested were minorities, while they make up about 33 percent of the population. The city of Bunkie had the highest disparity, with minorities making up 80 percent of all those arrested when they comprise only 52 percent of the city's population.
In De Soto, 53 percent of those arrested were minorities, while minorities make up 42 percent of the parish population.
A state law adopted in 2001 was intended to monitor and curtail racial profiling by requiring agencies to track the race of all motorists involved in traffic stops and submit these statistics to the state's Department of Public Safety. However, the law exempts from these requirements any agency with a written policy against racial profiling, leaving it a "largely empty gesture," according to the report.
The ACLU referred to this exemption as "an enormous loophole" and notes that the overwhelming majority of agencies adopted such a policy.
St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office officials don't dispute the numbers in the ACLU's report, but said that further analysis is needed to show why minorities were being arrested at a higher rate.
What's needed, Maj. Oswald said, is an evaluation that separates arrests made because of calls to police and those resulting from proactive methods, such as traffic stops. But even those numbers could be problematic because of the Sheriff's Office's narcotics and street crimes divisions, which conduct operations largely in the parish's poorer neighborhoods, Oswald said.
These areas often have a larger concentration of minorities than the parish as a whole but the operations usually are lauded by many in those communities, he said.
