COVER STORY
ORGANIZATIONS SOUND ALARM ON DURHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT
FOR RACIAL PROFILING AND SELECTIVE DRUG ENFORCEMENT
By Ian A. Mance & Daryl V. Atkinson
Contributing Writers
The following article is adapted, in part, from
a series of letters sent to Durham city leaders
from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice
and the FADE Coalition.
DURHAM, NC - In recent months, the Durham
Police Department (DPD) has been in the
headlines for all of the wrong reasons:
discriminatory traffic and drug enforcement
practices, round-ups of the homeless, the
tear-gassing of women and children at a
vigil, refusing to share information about the
in-custody death of a teenager, the wrongful
incarceration of NC Central student Lewis
Little.
With each passing month, the
list seems to grow. Through it all, the
department has maintained a consistently
defensive posture, one that has contributed
- in the words of NAACP Legal Redress Chair
Irv Joyner - to a “mistrust gap between
the Durham community and the Durham
Police Department [that] has…become
intolerable.”
In March, the Southern Coalition for
Social Justice (SCSJ), a Durham-based civil
rights organization, released a batch of
The document above, which SCSJ
lawyers obtained as part of a broader
investigation into racial profiling and
selective drug enforcement in Durham,
reveal the department has repeatedly paid
secret “conviction bonuses” - typically about
$300 cash - to drug informants whose
testimony or promise of testimony helped
obtain a criminal conviction. (Submitted file)
ABOVE: Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) and Fostering Alternatives to Drug Enforcement (FADE) held a press conference
recently to release their findings regarding Durham Police Department’s discriminatory traffic and drug enforcement practices. SCSJ
Attorneys Ian Mance (speaking) and Darryl Atkinson (inset photo), along with FADE members including Camryn Smith (right of Mance),
complied the data and submitted findings to Durham Mayor Bill Bell and other city leaders. (SUBMITTED PHOTO)
documents lending further credence to
allegations that Durham Police Department’s
drug and traffic enforcement practices
violate constitutional prohibitions against
discriminatory
policing. The
documents,
which SCSJ
lawyers obtained
as part of
a broader
investigation
into racial
profiling and
selective drug
enforcement in
Durham, reveal
the department
has
repeatedly
paid secret
“conviction
bonuses”
- typically
about $300 cash
- to drug informants
whose testimony or promise of testimony
helped obtain a criminal conviction.
All defendants known to have been
subjected to this practice were black or
Hispanic. The dates on the documents
indicate that officers made these payments
we