Durham Police CONTINUES
“a good way” to deter and catch individuals
engaged in selling drugs, despite a clear
constitutional prohibition against using
checkpoints for general crime enforcement
purposes. Speaking at the press conference,
Veronica Marshall Terry, another FADE
member and resident of a heavily-targeted
neighborhood along East Main Street,
asked pointedly, “Why are there not police
checkpoints in suburban or wealthy
downtown communities as often as they are
in ours?”
RACIAL PROFILING
SCSJ, FADE Coalition, and their allies
view the revelations about checkpoints
and conviction bonuses as symptomatic of
a broader issue facing the department—
namely, its willingness to resort to
unconstitutional and discriminatory practices
in its enforcement of drug laws. For months,
the groups, along with their allies in the
Durham NAACP, have been sounding the
alarm about the department’s anomalous
and troubling traffic enforcement practices.
This has occurred primarily in the context
of special hearings before the city’s Human
Relations Commission, which is scheduled
to issue a report on the issue to City Council
in April. The groups have frequently pointed
to an analysis of officer stop and search
data, presented to city leadership this past
fall, which demonstrated that at almost
every juncture, Durham police treat black
motorists more punitively and with greater
suspicion than white motorists.
This statistical evidence, drawn from
reports the department submits monthly
to the State Bureau of Investigation, paints
a picture of a discriminatory pattern of
policing. Among the many findings is the fact
that, despite accounting for just 17.4% of the
city population, black men constitute nearly
two-thirds (65.2%) of all persons searched
during traffic stops. Black women are
searched in the same numbers as white men
despite a large and well-documented gender
gap in crime rates.
These searches, which can last the
better part of an hour, often involve officers
physically removing people from their
vehicles, handcuffing them, patting them
down in sensitive areas, and placing dogs in
their cars. The overwhelming majority of
such searches uncover no contraband. But
their frequency has nevertheless increased
dramatically in recent years. In 2011,
Durham officers conducted more than twice
as many searches pursuant to motor vehicle
stops as they had just two years before.
Intentional or not, the department has
embraced policies and practices which place
African-Americans at a distinct disadvantage
compared to similarly situated whites, leading
to community allegations of institutional
racism. As the author Ta-Nehisi Coates once
wrote, “Racism is not merely a simplistic
hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy
toward some and broader skepticism toward
others.” This is what a 2012 UNC traffic stop
study and thirteen years of SBI data bear
out - a police department suspicious of black
motorists and deferential towards white ones.
Of the 5,288 consent searches the
department conducted between 2009 and
2013, more than two-thirds were requested
in response to an officer’s purported
observation of so-called “erratic or
suspicious” behavior. In many, if not most,
cases, this “suspicious” behavior amounts to
little more than being black while engaging in
innocuous every day activities.
This is, for example, what Pastor
Dominique Gilliard of Oakland, California,
learned when he was pulled over by Durham
police and told he fit the profile of a “drug
trafficker” while visiting town to atte