POLICE TRY TO SOLVE ARRESTS DISPARITY

Drug-Free Zones - Hidden Bias Is Among the Ideas Floated for Why More
Blacks Were Cited

A vexing mystery faces Portland police: Why did they ban African
Americans from the city's defunct drug-free zones more often than
whites or Latinos?

The drug-free zones, which faded into oblivion Sunday, lost key
political support last week when a report showed that police did not
equally issue exclusion notices, which bar people arrested or cited
on drug accusations from returning to the zones where the alleged
crimes happened.

More than two-thirds -- 68.2 percent -- of the African Americans
arrested got exclusion notices. That compares with 53.5 percent of
the non-Latino whites arrested and 46.4 percent of Latinos arrested.

"Pretty obviously, there was racial disparity in the numbers. That's
a huge concern," Police Chief Rosie Sizer said.

The numbers don't explain how that disparity came to be. But Portland
officials have hypotheses ranging from hidden bias to inadequate
training for police patrolling the most recently created East zone,
which ran along 82nd Avenue.

Mayor Tom Potter commissioned the report by consultant John Campbell.
Potter said the difference in arrests could share roots with "racial
profiling," the concept that police stop and question minorities more
often than they do whites. The mayor has started a committee to study
whether Portland has a racial profiling problem, how bad it is and
how to address it.

Defense lawyer Chris O'Connor, who fought the drug-free law for
years, said he doubts the system intended to discriminate against
African Americans. But it did so, and he urged the racial profiling
committee to look at why. He also said the next step should be to
study whether African Americans are targeted unfairly for drug
arrests: More than half the people arrested in the zones were African
Americans, who make up about 8 percent of the Portland population.

But many police officers strongly deny they target suspects by race,
and say African Americans are arrested more because they commit more
drug crimes. The Portland Police Association union issued a statement
Monday saying "there is no evidence that Portland Police have
disproportionately applied the law to any racial group, and no
evidence that the use of the law in any particular instance has been
inappropriate."

Sizer said "unintentional racial bias" could drive the disparity, but
she doubted it -- police generally dislike drug criminals, she said,
and would be unlikely to give some a break because they were white.

Sizer and other officers wondered whether other differences in the
data are driving the racial imbalance. People arrested on
methamphetamine accusations were mostly white and much less likely to
get exclusions than suspected cocaine users and dealers, who were
mostly African Americans, the report indicated. Officers who used the
law less often were more likely to apply it disproportionately. And
the law was used least in the meth-heavy East zone, which had the
biggest racial imbalance; there was no racial imbalance in the North
zone, which covers Portland's traditionally African American neighborhood.

To Sizer, that suggests that officers in the East zone didn't get
enough guidance on using the law. "We don't think, in retrospect,
that we appropriately trained it" there, she said.

The imbalance also may reflect that many meth arrests are made as
officers investigate other crimes, such as car thefts, so they might
not think about exclusions.

And unlink crack cocaine, Sizer said, meth is more often dealt in
private houses or by arranged phone meetings, situations where it's
easy to avoid drug-free zone exclusions. So officers might have found
exclusions a less useful tool for meth crimes than crack crimes, she said.