At the end of the torturous hour, City Council Member Richard McIver hit everybody over the head with a brilliant idea: Scrap the study. He has an excellent point. The proposed study, he argues, has a major flaw: A $225,000 yearlong project isn't going to fix the problem of race relations between the police and communities of color.
"Should there be another option to this?" McIver asked. "To not do the study, but go directly into identifying those areas we would like to beef up, to assure that we do not have any issues of unfairness?" For $225,000, he said, we could afford 20 more video cameras for cop cars. While that's not the entire fleet, it's a step in the right direction.
McIver's idea is a smart one. While a study is a good gesture--one likely to increase community confidence--it won't prove anything. The methods for comparing data are flawed, and the end result will be inconclusive, leading to another go-around over the same issues.
Here's what the data will tell us: who police stop, when and where it happens, what race the cop thinks the driver is, and what happens after the stop (a warning, a citation, or a search). The driver can also send in their comments about the stop.
While we can't see into the future, it's pretty easy, judging from previous studies, to guess what the numbers will show: a disproportionality between whites and blacks. Bob Scales, assistant director for public safety in the Strategic Planning Office, says it's "guaranteed that the study will find some degree of disproportionality" (blacks stopped and searched more than whites). Similar data collection efforts have taken place at over 400 law enforcement agencies around the country, and many have found disproportionality. Seattle has already seen those numbers too, in analyses by the Seattle Police Department in 2000 and the Washington State Patrol since May 2000.
This raises more questions than it answers: Do blacks commit more crime? Are whites getting away with crime? Are cops racist? Can the data be used to discipline officers?
In short, at the end of the study--despite the task force's arduous efforts--Seattle will be back at square one, asking if our cops are racially profiling.
So McIver's idea--cutting to the chase by installing more cameras now--is a better solution. Cameras record audio and video, creating a useful tool in analyzing traffic stops. A digital system currently being tested in a few cars makes storage and retrieval of the footage easy. The impartial record can also clear up, or prove, allegations of racial bias.
"Why don't we just take all the steps we would take to minimize unfairness?" McIver asks. Thankfully, both sides-- activists and police--support cameras in squad cars.
"Let's just go straight to that, and skip all the money-wasting," says Ken Saucier, the new Seattle Police Officer's Guild president. "You could start right now, having the objective evidence right there in living color and surround-sound. You wouldn't need studies."
Outspoken hard-lefty and recent city council candidate Michael Preston made cop-car cameras a centerpiece of his 2001 election campaign.
Steve Carter, a lieutenant with the Denver Police Department, has overseen Denver's data collection effort since June. So far, they've found the data isn't definitive. Cameras, on the other hand, could be.
"I think that's a far better investment," Carter says. "And there are always things that can be tuned up in terms of training. You don't need data to tell you that."
