In Boston, most individuals stopped by police but never arrested were African American, a report from the American Civil Liberties Union found.
Between 2007 and 2010, Boston police recorded some 200,000 cases in which they stopped individuals without later arresting them. Almost two-thirds of those were African American, even though they make up just 24.4 percent of the population, the ACLU found in a preliminary data analysis. Whites, by contrast, make up 53.9 percent of the city’s population but accounted for less than a quarter of stops.
The report found that after controlling for factors such as crime rates and gang affiliation, African Americans were still more likely to be stopped by police and that the number of stops in a neighborhood rises with the number of African American residents. Boston told ACLU it has a practice of only recording stops that do not result in arrest. So almost none of the 200,000 stops between 2007 and 2010 in which Boston police provided records rooted out criminal activity. In 2.5 percent of those cases, police seized contraband.
Both the ACLU and the city of Boston have argued that the numbers in the study might not create an accurate picture of the issue today. In addition to not including numbers in which individuals were stopped and later arrested, the ACLU asserts that the BPD officers frequently don’t write a report when they stop someone who does not have previous arrests or gang affiliation. Boston’s mayor Martin Walsh told the Boston Herald that because the numbers come from before 2010 they do not reflect new policies in the BPD. The ACLU has also not finished the analysis, but they have said they do not think the final findings will contradict what has been reported so far.
The ACLU found that in some three-quarters of those stops, the reason cited was simply to “investigate person.” This calls into question the legality of those stops, since the constitutional standard for stopping an individual is that an officer have “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity.
This is not the first time that Boston has gotten attention for racial profiling. In the 1980s, the BPD had a “search on sight” policy for African-American men in certain neighborhoods like Roxbury; the policy was declared unconstitutional by a superior court judge in 1989. Controversies have arisen in more recent years as well. In 2009, Harvard history professor Louis Gates was arrested while trying to enter his own home. In 2012, officers at Logan International Airport said that certain security programs targeted racial minorities.
A NAACP report in the wake of Michael Brown’s death found that 30 states have some sort of racial profiling law, but none meet the group’s standard for “an effective racial profiling law.” Massachusetts has a law that requires the police to record race and gender data during every traffic stop. The NAACP called on Congress to ban racial profiling earlier this fall as well. In September, it was reported that the Department of Justice is on the verge of putting in place a new policy that would ban profiling by federal officers based on religion and ethnicity.
In November, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that said the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy was discriminatory and unconstitutional, after one year in which New York made more stops of young black men than the population of young black men in New York. In January, New York city mayor Bill de Blasio said he would not appeal the court’s ruling, and the NYPD is currently changing the forms officers are required to complete after a stop-and-frisk to include information on why the stop was justified.