The Endless Cycle of Studies, Forums, and Doing Nothing About Policing in San Diego Continues
The third report in the last five years on the relationships between the San Diego Police Department and people of color landed last week, and it painted the same picture as the 2016 San Diego State University and 2019 ACLU accounts.
Succinctly stated, they all said: ‘if your skin is brown and you’re driving around town the SDPD will greet you with a frown.’ (If you’re lucky.)
What differentiates this report from the last two is that the department itself commissioned it, and it says evidence of discriminatory practices isn’t necessarily attributable to racism.
The Center for Policing Equity thinks this is the case because it’s impossible to get inside the head of each police officer as each incident occurs. From what I can tell, that’s the end result of all their research. It certainly was the case in Berkeley three years ago.
No provable intent = no racism. Case closed. Right? Wrong!
If cops were prosecutors, the New Racial Justice Act (Penal Code, Section 745), doesn’t require proving intent; the mere fact of disparities in actions taken toward minorities would require corrective action.
Back to the latest group of damning statistics, via Voice of San Diego:
After accounting for external factors, the new report found that Black people experience non-traffic stops 4.2 times more often as White people and were subjected to force 4.8 times as often as White people. During non-traffic stops, Asian and Latino people were searched 1.4 times as often as White people. Black and Latino people were also more likely to be searched during traffic stops, and Latino people were subjected to force 1.2 times as often as White people.
At a press conference Thursday, Police Chief David Nisleit reiterated his position that disparities are not evidence of discrimination. Instead, he described the new report as “a great roadmap to look at where we can make improvements with the community’s assistance, with the community’s involvement. It has to be a complete conversation,” he said.
In recent years, SDPD has argued that it’s irresponsible to compare, for instance, arrest rates for certain offenses against the city’s demographic breakdown. Yet the city has also implemented a series of reforms in response to Black Lives Matter protests — banning the carotid restraint, refocusing its special operations unit, updating its use of force policy, writing a standalone one for de-escalation and more.
I'd be amazed that anybody buys this bunk about no evidence of discrimination, except that it is essentially the same misdirection coming from Republicans having a cow over Critical Race Theory.
It’s the switcheroo of taking a critique of societal institutions and making it into a personal affront. The SDPD as an institution conveys the impression that admitting racism is a problem is an affront to their officers.
Statistics aside, the games the San Diego Police Department has historically played with any perceived or potential critique tell a story of an institution bound and determined to preserve its status as something apart from the community. And by community, I mean anybody not existing in the local law enforcement silos.
Take, for instance, the sordid history of citizen efforts to establish a mechanism for civilian oversight of police. The 1989 ballot measure creating a Community Review Board on Police Practices created the appearance of such oversight, but the reality was a different matter.
A 2018 Grand Jury report detailed what activists already knew, namely that the board was understaffed and unable to exhibit proper oversight of the San Diego Police Department.
From Times of San Diego:
Overall, the grand jury did find that many “do not consider the CRB as currently constituted to be independent from SDPD and do not believe the CRB reports reach fair and unbiased conclusions...”
...Currently, the board is only referred cases already investigated by SDPD Internal Affairs, which doesn’t investigate all officer-related complaints made by the public. Not receiving all complaints made to the department hinders the board’s oversight role, the grand jury found.
“The CRB does not participate in the categorization of complaints submitted to the SDPD. Consequently, the CRB cannot be certain that it sees all complaints that may be relevant to its advisory responsibilities, and cannot determine whether any have been misclassified,” the report says.
The grand jury also found that city staff have failed to implement Measure G, a 2016 voter-approved initiative that requires the board to review all in-custody deaths and officer-related shootings.
Yup. Even when the voters asked the city to do something, it was conveniently ignored. Credit the administration of former Mayor Kevin Faulconer for starving the board of resources and perpetuating the illusion of oversight by not providing funding.
It took years of effort by activists with Women Occupy San Diego to get a measure enabling investigatory powers by an agency not controlled by the police department. An attempt to get the idea before voters in 2018 disappeared into the bowels of the City Council’s bureaucracy. It ended up being delayed too long to allow for a required meeting with the union representing the police.
In 2020, Measure B won with 75% of the vote, replacing the existing police oversight board with the Commission on Police Practices. It’s supposed to have the power to conduct independent investigations and subpoena witnesses, and its own legal counsel.
Authorizing an entity and actually creating one requires an additional step, namely an ordinance establishing the structure and staffing. To date, no such ordinance has come before the City Council. A staff report to address the details was supposed to be completed by May 31. It’s running a bit late, we hear.
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In an article at Voice of San Diego, editor Sara Libby, recounted all the community forums on policing she’s attended over the years…
...In 2014 (after Shelley Zimmerman, then an assistant SDPD chief, made the astonishing claim that she’d never heard anyone in the community complain about racial profiling before... And in 2015...and in 2016… and in 2017… and in 2019.. and in 2020...
Here’s what happens: People tell officials that police racial profiling is rampant, and they spell out in painstaking detail the ways it has impacted them. Police listen to those complaints and consider their job done for having done so. The next batch of numbers inevitably shows more disparate treatment for Black residents by police, triggering a new round of forums. The police listen. Nothing changes. And the cycle chugs along in a continuous loop.
Speaking of late, let’s go back to reports on the SDPD.
The research done in 2016 by San Diego State University, led by Joshua Chanin, was prompted:
After a tense period that included San Diego Police admitting they stopped following their own policies to guard against racial profiling, sustained complaints from minority communities of being unfairly targeted by police, high-profile cases of police misconduct, a Justice Department review and the officer-involved shootings deaths of at least two unarmed minority men, city officials in 2015 decided to act: Then-Councilwoman Marti Emerald tapped Chanin and his team to research whether people of color were really being pulled over by SDPD at a disproportionate rate.
Although the report was submitted to the city in October, it’s release was delayed until December, while words like “bias” were replaced with “disparities.” Other portions were watered down justified by the assertion that “the revisions were necessary in order to persuade SDPD to take the study seriously.”
In fact, the city fought release of the earlier draft, saying that disclosure “would likely increase community tension and discontent.”
The City Council voted to accept the report in February 2017, but declined to implement any of its recommendations, saying --for instance--a suggestion that the department improve its data-collection efforts warranted further discussion.
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This most recent report was completed back in April. The reasons for the delay in releasing it ring hollow in light of past experiences. Via Voice of San Diego:
A link to the new report was provided to reporters at the press conference, but not before — meaning no one could ask about the study’s specific findings. For months, the city has been in possession of the Center for Policing Equity’s analysis but has refused to release it to Voice of San Diego, arguing that those materials are drafts until they’ve undergone a thorough review by SDPD leaders and are ready to be delivered to the City Council.
Ashley Bailey, a city strategic communications officer, said the report was finished in April but the city needed time to plan community meetings, post the information to the website and find a date for a City Council hearing once the budget discussions had passed. It includes lengthy explanations of the department’s community outreach efforts and other equity initiatives.
https://twitter.com/HomelessnessSD/status/1405890585139965952?s=20
And, hey, guess what? More forums!
The city says it will be holding a virtual community forum tomorrow (June 22) followed by a youth town hall on June 30. The June 29 City Council meeting will include a discussion on the report.
I’m guessing the public appetite for more chatter followed by inaction is wearing thin. Consider this snip from a Union-Tribune editorial:
The current police chief, David Nisleit, reacted much as Zimmerman did in 2016: acknowledging community concerns, but cautioning against concluding these statistical disparities “necessarily mean discrimination” is a problem at SDPD.
The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board agrees that being a police officer is difficult, and that most officers are conscientious and constructive. But as this study and others show, Chief Nisleit and Mayor Todd Gloria need to do more to address disparities in policing. Platitudes and public hearings won’t do. Only change will.
Talk is really getting cheaper all the time, as is Mayor Todd Gloria’s comment saying the new report is an invitation for “the public to come tell us how we can do better and being persistent in actually doing that work, not just issuing a report and saying, ‘Mission accomplished.’”
The public most impacted by the stats in these reports has been telling the city what it wants for years.
https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1407019837390458883?s=20
The politics of police - city government relations make it impossible to implement any real change as things currently stand. The treasury funds the SDPD, which I would argue largely functions without oversight.
It’s easy to say ‘let’s take the money away” (and spend it elsewhere), but that solution skips several steps necessitated by the realities of a representative democracy.
The reasons for lack of oversight have historical roots. Corrupt politicians dictating law enforcement policies (a fact of life in San Diego for much of the past) lead to things like the mafia infiltration of the police department. Law enforcement’s heritage stemming from the days when they functioned as slave patrols is the basis of cultural assumptions about communities of color even today.
The system is rigged for preserving the status quo of the power police have over politicians. And candidates for office can easily find a million reasons not to cross cops… Whether it’s the Deputy Sheriff Association’s ability to blanket the city with (good or bad) signage, or the spending of Independent Expenditure Committees on ads saying “soft on crime,” there are no easy ways to get around political reality.
When efforts at reform or restructuring have gone “too far,” crime rises. Or at least we get the perception that crime is rising. Sadly, the whole crime reporting system is broken.
https://twitter.com/createcraig/status/1406966056846041091?s=20
California’s successful ballot measures at reforming sentencing have led to a tsunami of bullshit aimed at proving that more incarceration is necessary.
We’re stuck in a cycle. The prison industrial complex has a vested interest in maintaining the United States’ record of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Policing is part of that system. In one sense, we’ve given public servants hammers and told them that nails are the solution.
Reform-oriented district attorneys are met with recall efforts almost before they take the oath of office. Police backed campaigns against such candidates are packed with racist and anti-semetic images and rhetoric. If law enforcement agencies aren’t racist institutions, why do they feel the need to use such tactics?
The path to changing the way police do their jobs starts with changing what we ask them to do. Changing what we ask them to do involves hearing and comprehending (not merely listening). Nobody wants an unsafe neighborhood… Most cops resent being tasked with the job of being clean up crews for the results of unfunded social programs.
And that’s a topic for another day... As is the even worse record of the San Diego County Sheriffs... I’ll get to it, I promise...
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Oh, and by the way…
The Center for Policing Equity is also in the process of producing a report for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.
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