City and community leaders disagree on racial profiling
City leaders and community members gathered at Columbia City Hall to discuss the growing violence nationwide, and the steps the city of Columbia needs to take in order to be model city.
Bishop Lorenzo Lawson, Executive Director of the Youth Empowerment Zone in Columbia told the crowd in attendance Saturday that, “In Columbia, we do have racial profiling, which means the chances of it happening is increased because they getting pulled over more and more.”
When it was time to for the City leaders and CPD Chief Ken Burton to take questions from reporters and the community, Chief Burton respectfully disagreed with Lawson. “Sounds like you’re implying police in Columbia racially profile? No, no they don’t,” he said, “the numbers are flawed, we could get into that but that’s the Bishop’s opinion and I respect that but my opinion is the data doesn’t go far enough.”
Looking at the data from the Attorney General’s Office in 2015, out of the 624 law enforcement agencies that were analyzed whites got pulled over more, but you will notice there is a higher population of whites in Missouri. In Missouri, the white population is 3,914,998. The black population is 515,828. Out of the population, pertaining to that ethnicity, 1,234,389 white drivers were stopped, and 276,445 blacks were stopped.
In the 2015 report
the disparity index shoes the proportion of stops divided by the proportion of population. For whites the disparity index is .95, and for blacks it’s 1.61. According to the Attorney General’s report, that means black were more likely to be pulled over in Missouri.
Chief Burton says “we need to collect a lot more data, than we are collecting because we just collect the number of people that are stopped, what their race is and then we stop there. There’s so many reasons why a police officer may stop somebody on traffic.”
Multiple law enforcement agencies in Mid Missouri say the data can be misleading, since traffic stops were lower for the black community, that means the disparity percentage went up.
