A California advisory board recommended this week that local law enforcement agencies should regularly check the cell phones, computers and social media accounts of police officers for racism, bigotry or other offensive content as the department seeks to rid itself of officers contributing to issues like racial profiling and police brutality.
According to the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board’s annual report, the Monday recommendation comes as the board, which evaluated more than 4 million state-wide vehicle and pedestrian stops by the largest law enforcement agencies last year, found people who were perceived as Black had run twice the risk of being stopped as compared to their percentage of the population.
The report concluded that Black people also had the highest chance that they would be stopped for reasonable suspicion, and were searched more than twice the amount of time as people believed to be white.
In the past, reform efforts have generally focused on training and efforts to make officers aware of the biases that may affect their interactions with people of the community. The Mercury News reported that a new law taking effect this year will require local agencies to screen job applicants for implicit and explicit biases.
“Unchecked explicit bias may lead to some of the stop data disparities we have observed,” the board said.
The advisory board’s report found that current and former members of the San Jose Police Department were discovered to have circulated racist Facebook posts. The problem also exists within a number of other state departments, like the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and San Francisco Police Department.
Betty Williams, the president of the NAACP’s Sacramento Branch, expressed that the recommendation should be amended to include officers’ personal cell phones.
However, state police officials argue that the disproportionate numbers may be the result of demographics, and not the effects of institutional racism.
“What these numbers don’t tell is that in Los Angeles, 70 percent of violent crime victims are either Black or Hispanic and that 81 percent of the reported violent crime suspects are either Black or Hispanic,” an official with the Los Angeles Police Protective League said.
Officials at a number of local law enforcement agencies said the prospect of racial bias is a bigger issue that must be solved as a country before critics condemn the institution of policing.
“Law enforcement agencies across California have embraced change, participated in training, and engaged their local communities on this topic and we will continue to do so,” said Kings County Sheriff David Robinson, president of the sheriffs’ association.
Cat Brooks, executive director of Justice Teams Network and co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, agrees that a more holistic approach needs to be taken in regards to police reform. Brooks said she believes the advisory board’s report indicates a need for a complete overhaul of policing.
“We’ve done trainings, we’ve done body cameras, we’ve done police commissions, we’ve hired from the community. All of these things to tinker around the edges of this very large problem, but really what we’ve been doing is putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds,” she said.
Despite the resources and tax dollars put into improving local policing, the board said that its annual report shows “there is significant work to be done to prevent further disparities in who is stopped, how they are treated when stopped” and what is the outcome as a result of them being stopped.
