Those who have watched Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson for any length of time know of his extensive white supremacist connections and attention-grabbing moves like instituting chain gangs, offering to have his prisoners build Trump’s border wall, informing on his own church in unctuous letters to former immigration advisor Stephen Miller, or personally participating in a jail riot. Hodgson is restless and ambitious, and he spends much of his time traveling at Massachusetts taxpayer expense to events organized by the Republican Party or by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and spinoffs like Advocates for Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC), most of which both the ADL and SPLC count as hate groups.

Hodgson’s newest project is called Protect America Now, which purports to be simply seven God-and-Country sheriffs who oppose immigration reform, gun control, voting rights, secularism, and socialism. The sheriffs include: the group’s spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb; Green County (MO) Sheriff Jim Arnott; Livingston County (IL) Sheriff Tony Childress; Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas Hodgson; Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey; Culpeper County (VA) Sheriff Scott Jenkins; and Wicomico County (MD) Sheriff Mike Lewis.

Despite Protect America Now’s call to help “stand strong against lawlessness,” most refuse to enforce state gun control laws or COVID-19 mask or social-distancing mandates. Instead, the sheriffs support arming and deputizing their mainly white counties against both urban protesters and border “invaders.”

Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb is the public face of Protect America Now. Lamb is a self-promoter with numerous businesses and organizations through which he and his wife Janel market themselves and their “God and Country” brand of nationalism. He has interests in two pest control businesses with police themes. One of Lamb’s “charities,” the American Sheriff Foundation, took in $50,000 in donations but can not account for $18,000 of it. The Foundation’s main function seems to be to sell Lamb’s “brand” and the couple’s books about themselves. Lamb is being investigated by the Arizona Attorney General for refusing to seize property in 2018 owned by the family of a lobbyist friend.

Lamb is a “Constitutional Sheriff” who claimed in one speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread”. He belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founded by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and appeared at CSPOA’s 2020 Virginia Conference. At least three other Protect America Now sheriffs, Thomas Hodgson, Scott Jenkins and Wayne Ivey, are also CSPOA members.

Jessica Pishko, in a Slate article entitled “Sheriffs Helped Lead This Insurrection,” hit the nail on the head when she wrote that “ninety percent of American sheriffs are white men, and in recent years they’ve become strongly affiliated with white supremacist groups. Across the country, sheriffs have declared that they will not enforce laws they deem ‘unconstitutional,’ like COVID-19 public health orders or gun laws limiting weapons possession and permits. Their influence has only grown since the pandemic began, as mask wearing became affiliated with progressive liberals and a bare face was a sign of Trump support. Trump has always had an affinity with sheriffs. He met with more sheriffs at the White House than any other president and pardoned ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for failing to abide by a nondiscrimination order, calling him an ‘American patriot.’“

The Protect America Now sheriffs — contrary to their mission to “stand strong against lawlessness” have arrogated themselves the additional roles of lawmakers and judges, picking and choosing which laws they flout and which they enforce. Many of these choices hinge on race.

Pishko explains the racist origins: “[…] the constitutional sheriff movement has explicitly white supremacist roots. When the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was unconstitutional, county sheriffs were among the Southern officials who defied the court’s decision. They claimed that, in fact, desegregation was unconstitutional and invoked a legal theory called ‘interposition,’ which argues that states can independently decide federal laws are unconstitutional and nullify them.”

Which is precisely the approach Trump and the GOP took in fighting both impeachment and Trump’s election loss.

When asked for comment on the January 6th Capitol insurrection, Lamb seemed to echo QAnon, attributing insurrectionist anger to the unpunished crimes of Hillary Clinton and defending the rioters: “I don’t know how loud we have to get before they have to listen to us and know we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away.” Lamb also repeated accusations of Democrat election fraud in a video that he subsequently took down.

Lamb is well-connected with the white supremacist Tanton network, its groups FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA, Angel Families, AVIAC, as well as border wall scammers like Steve Bannon (pardoned), Brian Kolfage (indicted), and Tom Hodgson, whose crowdfunding partnership with the now-defunct American Border Foundation, still can not account for more than $227,000 it collected.

While Lamb may be the poster boy for Protect America Now, six more sheriffs round out the roster. Some of them are less the ideologue than just cruel, arbitrary, racist, and crooked jailers who work for a white constituency that thinks cruelty is the only way to run jails and conduct police patrols.

Sheriff Jim Arnott serves Green County in the Missouri Ozarks. Like his brothers in Protect America Now, Arnott does things his way, voters and employees be damned. Arnott has made a name for himself insisting on his officers’ belief in a deity. When asked by one reporter what he would do if one of his deputies objected to his mandatory “In God We Trust” decal, Arnott replied, “Well, I guess he’d have to work somewhere else if he didn’t like it that bad.”

Like several other sheriffs, including Tom Hodgson, who was investigated by Homeland Security, the Massachusetts Attorney General, and a Congressional delegation for his personal participation in a correctional officer riot, Arnott runs a cruel, filthy jail where half those incarcerated have contracted COVID-19. In 2018 a county employee blew the whistle on Arnott’s sheriff’s department being pressed into a political campaign for a county tax increase. Arnott sued the state for the identity of the whistleblower and launched a barrage of press releases designed to fight the case in the court of public opinion. Arnott even harassed a county commissioner who had objected to Arnott’s ethics violations. Ultimately Arnott lost his case and finally had to admit that he had indeed violated state ethics laws.

Tony Childress of Livingston County, Illinois, is Protect America Now’s only Black sheriff. Childress was one of the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s earliest converts to its xenophobic “border invasion” campaign. With fellow Protect America Now members Hodgson and Jenkins, Childress attended a FAIR- and CIS-led junket to the Mexican border in 2014. Childress was also one of 40 sheriffs who met with former president Trump in 2019 about hardening border security. In 2018 Childress was found to have engaged in a little double-dipping — serving as sheriff while also working as a security consultant for Innovative Security Solutions. Childress defended his actions with the usual sheriff defense — whatever he had done was done solely in the interests of public safety.

Brevard County, Florida Sheriff Wayne Ivey is the living, breathing incarnation of the Southern sheriff. In 2013 Ivey re-introduced slave-style chain gangs. It was a racist touch that Arizona’s Joe Arpaio used and which Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson has also tried. If Ivey’s chain gangs were not bad enough, Brevard County’s sheriff produces “Wheel of Fugitive” videos and encourages the county’s 83% white citizens to arm themselves. Slave catching is alive and well in Brevard County.

In 2018 Ivey’s deputies murdered Gregory Edwards, a jailed Black veteran, by punching, tasing, and pepper-spraying him before placing a hood over his head and strapping him into a chair. Edwards died of a non-medical “police diagnosis” called “excited delirium.” At first Ivey refused to turn over the videos of Edwards’ death, but eventually agreed to turn over a sanitized version. In 2020 Ivey’s deputies murdered two Black teenagers,18-year-old Sincere Pierce and 16-year-old Angelo Crooms, by shooting into their moving car. Again Ivey refused at first to release the video.

After his deputies killed Edwards, Ivey paid a surprise visit to Edwards’ widow “for a welfare check.” Ivey, ringed by half a dozen deputies, showed up at Kathleen Edwards’ home unannounced, demanded she “step outside,” upon which Ivey grabbed and then, inexplicably and grotesquely, hugged her. It was a bizarre, cruel, and menacing visit. “Out of respect for Mrs. Edwards’ privacy, the Sheriff’s Office will not be commenting on the nature or purpose of tonight’s service call at her residence,” Ivey’s media spokesman said, while acknowledging that the deputies had also filmed the staged confrontation.

Like Sheriff Arnott, Ivey insists that his deputies affix “In God We Trust” decals to their vehicles. And for those who like their God and Country nationalism in equal doses, Ivey also insists on playing the national anthem or staging some “patriotic moment” every Monday. In 2017 the City of Orlando passed the Trust Act, which limited the ability of city police to assist ICE. In 2018 outraged county commissioners, with Ivey’s help, sponsored an “anti-sanctuary” resolution.

For all his faux devotion to God and Country, upright behavior has not been the result. In 2011 Ivey retired from the Florida department of law enforcement (FDLE) three days after he was accused of threatening a female probation officer who just happened to be the former fiancee of Ivey’s son Robert.

Like Mark Lamb, Ivey sounded the alarm when Black Lives Matter began protesting police murders. At the height of the protests in June 2020, Attorney Alton Edmond, who organized a George Floyd rally that drew more than 3,000 people, announced an election challenge to Ivey. It was the first time the Democratic Party had bothered to challenge the Republican.

Scott Jenkins is the Sheriff in Culpeper County, Virginia. In September 2020 Jenkins posted a video rant on his department’s Facebook page: “Citizens should alert themselves to the true nature of this violence and realize the intent is for it to continue across our nation during the months ahead. Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement is not peaceful and at their heart are violent. They may bring their violence to any community at any time and especially where they see weakness in local government officials. These are a few of the many examples across our nation.”

So frightened of Black protesters was Jenkins that he advocated turning his county’s 80% white citizenry into reserve deputies to fight “lawlessness,” gun control and other forms of legislative or judicial “meddling” that he, Scott Jenkins, determined to be “unconstitutional.” Jenkins openly flouts his state’s gun laws. And if it sounds like the sheriff might just be a CSPOA member, well, it’s because he is.

A number of county residents have launched a legal effort to recall Jenkins, and he was sued by the Legal Aid Justice Center in Falls Church, Virginia, for handing over an undocumented immigrant to ICE in 2017. After serving his time in the county jail, Francisco Guardado Rios was held past his release date in order to be turned over to ICE, as Jenkins had done to 100 other undocumented detainees. It was unconstitutional and violated even state law, but Jenkins fought law and precedent, finally prevailing in U.S. District Court. This made him a hero to the far right.

Wicomico County, Maryland Sheriff Mike Lewis is another Protect America Now sheriff who refuses to enforce gun laws. “State police and highway patrol get their orders from the governor,” Lewis said. “I get my orders from the citizens in this county.” In a video Lewis told one reporter, “As long as I’m the sheriff in this county, I will not allow the federal government to come in here and strip my citizens of their right to bear arms. I can tell you this, if they attempt to do that, it would be an all-out civil war, no question about it.”

Responding to Lewis’ inflammatory rhetoric, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence launched a petition calling for the Maryland Police Training Commission to revoke Lewis’ certification. “It is difficult to see how a law enforcement officer who is threatening to wage war with the United States government meets any recognized standards of public service. In the wake of his threatening comments, Sheriff Lewis should not be given the responsibility of training law enforcement officers in Maryland.”

Contrary to Protect America Now’s marketing on Fox News and elsewhere, Protect America Now is not Lamb’s creation. It turns out the incorporator and director of Protect America Now is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative who has been accused of, fired for, and charged with multiple counts of voter fraud, and who set up Protect America Now most recently in June 2020. As a sometime associate of Karl Rove, Sproul’s whole career has been devoted to voter suppression and dirty tricks.

It is no coincidence that today’s Protect America Now has is roots in a similar organization created 18 years ago or that Nathan Sproul was involved in both. The trademark for Protect America Now was created in 2004 and was the brainchild of Kathy W. McKee, who is still listed on a PAC registration with a similar name. McKee was also the force behind Arizona’s 2004 bill. Proposition 200, a voter suppression bill. As soon as McKee got Prop 200 on the ballot, the GOP and every brownshirt and satin-sheeted group took an interest.

But McKee made the mistake of bringing a white supremacist, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, onto the organization’s national advisory board. Abernethy turned out to be even too extreme for the rest of PAN’s racists and xenophobes, so the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which had previously supported McKee and Abernethy, stepped in to save Prop 200 despite its previous support for Abernethy.

Between 2004 and 2005 there was a power struggle for control of Protect America Now between McKee and the Federation for American Immigration Reform and, once again, it involved Nathan Sproul. As he had done with the Kanye 2020 campaign, in 2004 Sproul paid signature collectors to get Ralph Nader on the ballot in order to siphon Democratic votes. But while Sproul’s signature gatherers were getting Nader on the ballot their prime mission was gathering signatures for the voter suppression bill.

The story gets even weirder when we learn that the lawyer who incorporated Protect America Now for Sproul is Kory Langhofer, an equally ethically-unencumbered GOP lawyer who fought both the Mueller investigation for Trump and challenged Arizona election results for Trump. Protect America Now and Langhofer’s offices share a common address. Langhofer is also the co-owner of Signafide, a company that uses artificial intelligence software to challenge ballot signatures.

Two years ago, Hodgson, Lamb, Ivey and the others were just a bunch of Stetson-hatted MAGA zealots supporting cruel immigration policies promoted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller. But by dutifully groveling and doing whatever was asked of them, each has established a closer personal connection to Donald Trump and to a Republican Party that finally looks like them.

As the GOP increasingly embraces nativism, the extremists have gone mainstream. Involvement by high level GOP operatives like Nathan Sproul and Kory Langhofer with sheriffs like Hodgson and their dangerous militia and white supremacist connections says a lot about the party’s transformation.

Not so very long ago it was racist and xenophobic extremists who worked behind the scenes to support the GOP. Now it’s the Republican Party operating behind the scenes to support the extremists.

When Citizens for Juvenile Justice published their study of racially-biased police stops in New Bedford, We are the Prey, the usual Only Blue Lives Matter voices savaged the report, completely rejecting the possibility that racist policies and personnel may be operating within the New Bedford Police Department.

But no one should have been shocked by the results. Most American cities have long suffered from racist policing, as hundreds of studies over the years have amply documented and other cities have even acknowledged.

CFJJ’s report — informed by data the NBPD itself supplied — shows precisely how, when, where, by whom, and why racial profiling is done. Its findings faulted vague disciplinary policies, poor data collection, arbitrary assignment of youth to an opaque gang database, over-policing in certain neighborhoods, clear over-policing of Black and Hispanic youth, and a relatively small number of officers doing most of the racial profiling. In fact, CFJJ identified the NBPD’s “Top Ten” on page 16 of their report.

This small number of officers whom CFJJ found responsible for the many racially-motivated stops was cited in an Amicus Brief on a racial profiling case now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The case concerns the New Bedford Police gang unit’s pretextual stop of a vehicle with a backseat passenger well-known to the unit.

The gang unit officers who searched and arrested passenger Zahkuan J. Bailey-Sweeting after the driver supposedly made an unsafe lane change included at least three officers responsible for the most stops in the CFJJ data. These three officers — Roberto DaCunha, Gene Fortes, and Kory Kubik — alone accounted for one of seven stops in the CFJJ data. Bogus, and very likely unconstitutional, traffic violations no doubt help inflate these officers’ numbers.

I was curious to see if any of these officers appeared in a “Professional Standards” document the NBPD released to the public last year. The NBPD spreadsheet shows a backlog of police complaints over many years with a status (filed, sustained, not, exonerated). The cases go back as far as 2012.

So I cross-referenced the NBPD complaints and disciplinary issues on all officers mentioned in the CFJJ report, using the number preferred by the NBPD — number of stops — rather than CFJJ’s number of individuals affected by those stops. The result was a spreadsheet shown in the image above (available for download).

Even if one stop targeted five individuals, I only looked at discrete officer stops. The results were only slightly different from CFJJ’s, but even when using NBPD’s preferred metric the results still showed a high degree of racial profiling, an apparent lack of officer discipline, and they suggest a culture of police impunity.

CFJJ’s analysis by race depended on counting individuals affected by the police. But mine was focused on the police officers making those stops. Five officers accounted for almost 25% of all stops, eleven accounted for 40%, and eighteen officers accounted for 50%. There was nothing in those results to contradict CFJJ’s conclusions — even using NBPD’s preferred metric.

One officer — Roberto DaCunha — alone accounted for 6.6% all individual stops. That’s one out of fifteen of all stops supplied to CFJJ by the NBPD. And DaCunha did it without incurring even a single disciplinary write-up — ever. In addition to his involvement in the Bailey-Sweeting stop, DaCunha is the same officer named in a lawsuit for the wrongful death of Erik Aguilar, which cost the City of New Bedford almost a million dollars to settle. In the investigation that followed, DaCunha invoked the Fifth Amendment and investigators appeared to be satisfied with that. The Aguilar family’s lawsuit maintained that DaCunha and four others “knew that leaving Mr. Aguilar in this position could cause him to die from asphyxia, yet they did not move him from this position until after his heart had stopped beating.”

I do not have list of officers in the gang unit. However, none of the officers in the gang unit whose names I recognize from past news reports or from Malcolm Gracia’s murder appear to have racked up any consequential disciplinary complaints. And many of the officers with the highest numbers of stops either received no disciplinary write-ups — or received write-ups for only relatively minor issues: mishandling evidence or failing to report for duty. This seems to suggest that their racial profiling is either condoned or incentivized.

Some of the more troubling disciplinary issues among New Bedford’s Finest include: Civility; Respect of Others; Violation of General Order 3-20 Anti-Discrimination policy; Violation of General Order 12-02 Use of Force; Knowledge of laws; Commission of an act of abusive conduct; Immoral Conduct Conduct unbecoming; Conduct injurious to the public; Neglect of Duty; Insubordination; Suspicious Conduct; [Not] Speaking the truth; Issuing False Statements; Consorting with Criminals; Use of intoxicants; Physical and mental fitness; Return of Property to Owner; Absent without Leave; and Ignorance of Departmental Rules and Regs.

Year after year officers keep violating the same policies over and over, yet they remain on the force. Chris Cotter, for example, who also serves on the New Bedford School Committee, has violated computer and social media policies repeatedly since 2014, as his sustained disciplinary cases attest.

14-1752 502.2 Respect of others; 14-1752 502.3 Civility; 14-1752 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 15-1796 Viol of General Order 13-06 – Use of Dept. Vehicle; 15-1796 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 16-1822 Viol of General Order 2-13 – Computer Usage Policy; 16-1822 Viol of General Order 3-24 – Social Media Policy; 17-1856 Viol of General Order 3-24 – Social Media Policy; 17-1856 Viol of General Order 7-02 Release of info to media; 17-1857 515.6(c) Insubordination – Disrespect for ranking officer; 18-1951 502.2 Civility; 18-1951 501.6 Providing police service on duty; 18-1951 501.9 Answering questions; 18-1951 515.6(l) Improperly performing duties assigned; 19-2009 515.6(c) Insubordination; 19-2009 502.2 Civility; 19-2009 502.3 Respect of Others

Paul Hodson, accused of killing Erik Aguilar in 2010, had no disciplinary issues until 2019 when he was written up for: [19-1992] 515.6(o) Commission of any act contrary to the order and discipline of the dept; and 501.1 Suspicious conduct. Despite repeatedly and publicly disparaging minorities on social media, Hodson happily enjoyed departmental impunity — until he was finally sent away on federal child pornography charges in 2019.

Damien Vasconcelos, who was also named in the Aguilar lawsuit for failure to render aid and apparently gave Hodson a congratulatory fist bump at the scene, had several, mostly low-level, disciplinary issues sustained.

When you read through the Professional Standards cases, it is striking that in any other job authoritarians, racists, drunks, liars, rude employees, no-shows, and insubordinates would be quickly sent packing.

Unfortunately, the data shows that New Bedford police are doing a far better job of serving themselves and covering their own backs than protecting and serving the people of New Bedford.

When the Citizens for Juvenile Justice report on racial profiling by the New Bedford Police was released in April 2021, the usual police zealots and members of city government attacked CFJJ’s numbers and screamed that New Bedford was different from those “other” cities. We couldn’t possibly be racists.

But it’s not as if police racism has ever been a secret or a surprise. For years local governments everywhere have brushed off community complaints of racial profiling, harassment, and police violence. But over the years a massive body of research has been amassed, showing that — and precisely how — so many of our institutions are corrupted by institutional racism. Sure, there may be a few bad apples in the barrel, but the point is — the barrel itself is rotten. But again, we have long known this and also how to fix it. We just choose not to.

Below is just a small selection of articles on racial profiling available in April 2021, as the Citizens for Juvenile Justice Report was released. While hardly exhaustive, they demonstrate that the NBPD’s racial profiling of Black and Hispanic youth is not unheard of. Everywhere. CFJJ’s numbers are not anomalous. At least one article makes the case that statistical data like CFJJ’s not only confirms the reality of racial profiling, but “furthermore, strong statistical associations should support an inference of discriminatory intent.”

And I agree. Politicians and policy experts have known about the many insidious forms of racial profiling and their costs to society’s most vulnerable for decades, as these articles illustrate. And when cities know the costs of racial profiling and racist policing and still refuse to stop it, then, yes, that’s racism by design.

• 1/3 Of People Killed By Police After A Traffic Stop This Year Were Black | The Crime Report

• 2018 Executive Summary

• 24 Frightening Racial Profiling Statistics – Vittana.org

• A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States | Nature Human Behaviour

• A new statistical test shows racial profiling in police traffic stops | Stanford School of Engineering

• Activists back Senate approach to traffic stop data – News – The Herald News, Fall River, MA – Fall River, MA

• Analysis: LAPD searches blacks and Latinos more often – Los Angeles Times

• Are Traffic Stops Prone to Racial Bias? | The Marshall Project

• Arizona Traffic Stop Data Analysis Study: Year 3 Final Report – 2009

• Bill would require collection of race data in traffic stops

• Black men are 8 times more likely to be stopped by Oakland police than White men, data shows – ABC7 San Francisco

• Black men fleeing the police is reasonable, Massachusetts court rules | PBS NewsHour

• Black, Hispanic drivers searched more often than white drivers, data shows

• Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – Traffic Stops

• Chicago police more likely to stop Black drivers without citing them, data investigation reveals – ABC7 Chicago

• Cleveland Heights police cited by CSU Diversity Institute over 3:1 racial disparity in traffic stops – cleveland.com

• Confronting allegations of racial profiling in Massachusetts – Harvard Law Today

• Connecticut data reveal racial disparities in policing | DataHaven

• Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Data Project – CTRP3 – CTData Collaborative

• COPS Evaluation Brief – Promoting Cooperative Strategies to Reduce Racial Profiling – 2008

• Data suggests racial bias in NH traffic stops

• Decades of Data Suggest Racial Profiling is Getting Worse, Not Better

• Do Maryland police target minorities? The data can’t tell us – CNS Maryland

• Does the Minneapolis Police Department Traffic Stop Data Reveal Racial Bias? – Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality

• Driving while Black: ABC News analysis of traffic stops reveals racial disparities in several US cities – ABC News

• Duluth group examines apparent racial disparities in DPD traffic stop data, NAACP asks for change

• Duluth to take closer look at police race bias, traffic stops – StarTribune.com

• FBI Data: Racial Profiling Is Real … and Ferguson Is Just the Tipping Point

• Few states require local police to collect race data on traffic stops – pennlive.com

• Findings – The Stanford Open Policing Project

• Grand Rapids police oversight department to start collecting racial disparities in arrest, traffic stop data – mlive.com

• Houston Police Department’s analysis of motor vehicle stop data for 2015

• Illinois Traffic and Pedestrian Stop Study – Data from 2004 to 2019

• Inside 100 million police traffic stops: New evidence of racial bias

• It’s time to start collecting stop data: A case for comprehensive statewide legislation — The Policing Project

• Mapping Police Violence – Database and GIS Mapping

• Mass Police Reform – Working to Reform Policy & Practice

• Mass. High Court Lowers Burden For Proving Racial Bias In Police Stops | WBUR News

• Mass. SJC wants lawmakers to require racial data on traffic stops | Boston.com

• Massachusetts Police Data Points to Disparities In Arrests – NBC Boston

• Massachusetts Racial and Gender Profiling Study – Final Report May 2004

• Massachusetts Statute for the Collection of Data Relative to Traffic Stops

• Newsday analysis: Suffolk police stopped, searched minority drivers at higher rates | Newsday

• North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation – Traffic Stop Statistics

• Ohio State Highway Patrol | Statistics

• Pa. State Police resume tracking racial data during traffic stops in response to Spotlight PA report

• Police data collection project (New Bedford Police Department) • MuckRock

• Police Stop Black Drivers At Higher Rate Than Whites In California | HuffPost

• Police stops are still marred by racial discrimination, new data shows. | Prison Policy Initiative

• Policing and Racial Justice | The Kansas Data Project: Injustice by the Numbers

• Portland Police Bureau Traffic Stop and Search Data – Sep 23 2009

• Project CommUNITY: Massachusetts not immune to racial bias in policing

• Race and Policing – 100+ studies

• Race-Based Traffic Stop Data Dashboard – 2019

• Racial Disparities in Traffic Stop Outcomes

• Racial Disparities In Traffic Stops Decrease, But Inequalities Remain | Connecticut Public Radio

• Racial disparities revealed in massive traffic stop dataset – UofSC News & Events | University of South Carolina

• Racial gap found in traffic stops in Milwaukee

• Racial Profiling and Mandatory Data Collection in Nevada: How will Law Enforcement Respond? will Law Enforcement Respond?

• Racial Profiling and Traffic Stops | National Institute of Justice

• Racial Profiling? A Multivariate Analysis of Police Traffic Stop Data – Michael R. Smith, Matthew Petrocelli, 2001

• SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

• San Diego Has Fallen Behind on Combating Police Racial Profiling

• Session Law – Acts of 2000 Chapter 228

• State of California Department of Justice – OpenJustice

• State police traffic stop data shows racial disparities remain  – VTDigger

• State-commissioned study finds racial disparities in R.I. traffic stops for 4th year in a row – The Boston Globe

• States Face Up To Realities Of Police Racial Profiling | The Pew Charitable Trusts

• Stops, Citations, and Arrests – Police Data Initiative

• Study of 100 million police stops finds black motorists are more likely to be pulled over | CNN

• Ten years’ worth of NC traffic stop data reveal racial disparities in searches in North Carolina

• Texas was supposed to collect racial-profiling data. It left out most of the ‘racial’ part.

• The Long Road to Ending Pretextual Stops | Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review

• The Statistical Evidence of Racial Profiling in Traffic Stops and Searches: Rethinking the Use of Statistics to Prove Discriminatory Intent

• Traffic Stop Data | Arizona Department of Public Safety

• Traffic Stop Data Reporting – Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services

• Traffic stop report shows lack of progress on racial disparities – VTDigger

• Traffic-stop data won’t halt debate over racial profiling | The Seattle Times

• UTEP Analysis of San Jose Police Department Stop Data Focuses on Racial Disparities

• Vehicle Stop Data Collection – City of Sacramento

• Vehicle Stops Report – Missouria 2020

• VSP releases 2019 traffic-stop data, racial disparities remain | Vermont Business Magazine

• What data on 20 million traffic stops can tell us about ‘driving while black’ – The Washington Post

• What decades of traffic stop data reveals about police bias – CBS News

• Wisconsin State Police Stops: How Choices in Madison have led to Missing Racial Data and Other Outcomes | Data Science Blog

• Would taking police out of traffic stops make a difference in reform?

There’s been a lot to unpack this week, both nationally and locally

The United States has over a thousand police killings each year, and many of them are of unarmed Black and brown people. In fact, America has more daily or weekly police killings than some European nations have homicides from all causes combined in a single year. And yet Americans — and I mean the majority, you, my fellow white Americans — are in deep denial of both facts and the reasons for all this spilled blood. Both the Chauvin trial and a recent report documenting the extent of racial profiling by the New Bedford Police have received a tremendous amount of blowback from white people. So I’d like to address both in this rather long essay.

Police serving American cities ought to be able to bring more to the door than a service weapon, but that’s apparently what White America wants. Those serving the public ought to have skills in psychology, first aid, social services, conflict resolution, and de-escalation. Here in Massachusetts all school teachers are expected to have masters degrees in order to be “highly qualified.” Police officers, on the other hand, are more likely to pursue memberships at health clubs and shooting ranges than college credits. And let’s face it: we hire police for their muscle, with a clear preference for combat veterans skilled in the arts of war.

The brutal truth is that the real function of the policing White America wants is evident in almost every police interaction. There’s no sugarcoating it. States hire cops for brutality — to compel immediate compliance with the law. But it’s not working. Or perhaps it’s working so well that in an age of ubiquitous cameras police forces have now exposed this brutality and, in the process, the extent of America’s police state.

For this reason, communities all over the United States are considering reallocating police funding to the essential human services now being mishandled by police. The idea is that targeting mental health and drug crises with professional skills, not Glocks and Tasers, will prevent some of this carnage. And relieving police of routine traffic control is likewise intended to reduce the pretextual (translation: Constitutionally dubious) stops that all too often result in a police shooting. But this is not enough. America also needs to face up to its legacy of policing born of slave-catching. After January 6th, though, I have a low opinion of White America’s ability for self-reflection.

America’s police, at least in Black and brown communities, are not there “to protect and to serve” so much as they are there to maintain old, discredited, unconstitutional models of “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing. You can dress it up — as the New Bedford Police Department has at various points — with euphemisms like “High Energy Patrols” or “Walk and Talk” or the much-abused “community policing.” But what police, many with recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, really mean by “community policing” is actually more akin to occupation and pacification of the enemy.

This “us versus them” attitude, well-entrenched in police culture and seen daily in police Tweets and Facebook posts (like the Fall River Police Department’s post on George Floyd), and reinforced by bad hiring, the rare firing, little discipline, minimal oversight, virtually nonexistent accountability and vague operational policies — none of this can be fixed overnight. Communities need to start from scratch to redefine how they want to be policed — that is, if they really want to stop the bloodletting.

The media may prefer neutral terms like “controversial” to describe the unconstitutional stops and patdowns, the pretextual traffic stops, the 24/7 surveillance, the “predictive policing,” and the racial profiling that accompany a police occupation. But there is nothing “controversial” about it. It is just plain wrong. It is illegal and it’s got to stop. Otherwise America will remain little more than a police state, especially for people of color.

Police, naturally, resist data collection and reporting obligations that might draw attention to racist practices. So, it is often up to community groups and independent researchers, using data only very reluctantly and resentfully provided by the police themselves which is intentionally incomplete or obfuscated — data they were compelled to produce by public information requests — to step into the breach and study patterns of racist policing. The CFJJ report was just that.

Last week’s Citizens for Juvenile Justice report on NBPD field police observations involving nearly 5,000 individuals showed that New Bedford Police have never stopped using racial profiling. CFJJ took some heat from the NBPD, the police union, and the Far Right for reporting on precisely what the NBPD had given them. But a 2018 Organizational Assessment study of the NBPD noted that the NBPD doesn’t collect accurate data because it just doesn’t care: “Obtaining accurate data was a challenge […] The multitude of errors present in all areas of the data indicate a lack of supervision and oversight both in communications and patrol. […] A quick review of some of the entries […] shows the errors in the data along with a disregard for the importance of collecting accurate data…”

To this date the NBPD has failed to make numerous recommendations in that 2018 Organizational Assessment of the NBPD commissioned by the Mayor, which also interviewed members of the community at large. And that report followed a 2015 report by the ACLU documenting the NBPD’s racist policing, and the 2012 Malcolm Gracia shooting — itself the result of racial profiling. Nothing has changed in at least a decade because the NBPD simply rejects reform.

From the same 2018 Organizational Assessment: “There is little evidence of a team approach, and there is significant resistance to change within the patrol division. The command staff does not appear to readily embrace innovation and often gravitated to sentiments such as ‘this is how we have always done it’ and ‘things will never change.'”

The 2018 report also noted that officer discipline cases had languished for many years and that only under the leadership of the most recent police chief was any effort made to address the backlog of disciplinary cases. Naturally, the police union retaliated by forcing a “no confidence” vote on the chief.

It’s clear that change is not going to come from within the nation’s police forces, city councils, or the nation’s mayors. It seems clear that change will be imposed upon the nation’s police by legislation like H.R.1280 – the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, and by eliminating a legal doctrine called Qualified Immunity, which confers impunity to police for even the most egregious acts. For this reason, H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, was filed by Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley.The goal is to eliminate outrageous deviations from normal criminal justice norms. Police shouldn’t get concierge service in the nation’s courts.

As much as New Bedford’s mayor and police officials might like to pretend that New Bedford is unique, the city’s police force is no different from most in America. If you were outraged at Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in front of Cup Foods until he died, while several other officers stood around watching, then you would be equally outraged at watching the video of officer Paul Hodson kneeling on Erik Aguilar in front of New Bedford’s Extra Mart until he too was dead, while several other officers made no attempt to resuscitate Aguilar. The striking difference between these two cases is that, while we all watched Chauvin led off in handcuffs to prison, Hodson remained on the NBPD payroll until he was finally prosecuted — not for killing Aguilar but on federal child pornography charges. And in both killings it was not just one officer demonstrating callous disregard for human life. It was all of them.

Let me repeat that. It was all of them. There are no bad apples in the nation’s police forces. The apple barrels are so rotten that good apples don’t stand much of a chance of preserving individual integrity. This is why change must be sweeping and why it must be imposed. Police are incapable of reforming themselves.

But digging deeper, where does such contempt for non-white life come from, and why is it so easily excused? Most of White America completely rejects police accountability. To listen to many of my fellow white folks’ own words, America’s overwhelmingly white police forces are there to keep non-white “mobs” from overrunning white neighborhoods. Referencing the “carnage” that Donald Trump referred to in his racist inauguration speech, White America also sees the non-white “mob’s” demands for justice as an equal threat to their supremacy. The “Us versus them” mentality of police extends to the “Us versus them” inherent in a race war. A race war that White America seems all to eager to have.

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt called Derek Chauvin a “sacrifice to the mob.” Sheriff Tom Hodgson’s pal Michelle Malkin used almost the same words: “Chauvin was sacrificed.” Donald Trump’s friends the Proud Boys circulated a post, “Derek Chauvin Did Nothing Wrong.” Georgia Congresswoman with No Committees Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed Chauvin’s conviction on Black people — BLM particularly, which has “proven itself to be the most powerful domestic terrorist organization in our country. After Maxine Waters’ threats, could there have been any other verdict?” Fox News’ resident Alt-White host Tucker Carlson also blamed the guilty verdict on Black terror in characteristically offensive terms: “The jury in the Derek Chauvin trial came to a unanimous and unequivocal verdict Tuesday afternoon: ‘Please don’t hurt us.'”

That same white supremacy on display following the Chauvin verdict was also on display following the release of the CFJJ report on New Bedford police racial profiling. A lot of it came from WBSM, especially from Barry Richard, whose latest includes the meaningless bromides: “the system works when given a chance” and “a nation divided must learn to heal.” In a post attacking CFJJ’s report on racial profiling Richard accused the mayor of failing to defend the NBPD, and in another he called police critics “malcontents who threaten to destabilize […] society.” Richard wrote that CFJJ was “attempting to create racial division where it does not exist and is looking to drive a wedge between the minority communities and the police […] — people who have co-existed in relative peace and harmony for so many years.” Richard would have you believe that there are no local critics of New Bedford police, only outside agitators. One wonders why Richard didn’t write reams about the many out-of-staters who invaded the nation’s Capitol on January 6th.

New Bedford City Councilor Brian Gomes — the New Bedford Councilor representing the Police Ward — was featured in another of Richard’s posts, calling the CFJJ report “garbage” and promising to introduce a City Council motion to stand in support of the NBPD. Gomes, the same Councilor who introduced a resolution to reject ending qualified immunity, who wanted to buy drones to surveil New Bedford residents, and who supported Southern-style chain gangs, also accused CFJJ of trying to “stir things up” in the City. Once again, no Dixie-style defense of local law enforcement would be complete without calling critics “outside agitators.”

But the CFJJ report resonates with a lot of people in New Bedford, including most of the groups which sponsored the CFJJ webinar. Including old-time observers of local politics like former Standard-Times editor Jack Spillane, who now hosts a website on New Bedford politics. In one of his latest pieces, Spillane noted that, even if the CFJJ study made assumptions that the NBPD could find fault with, the fact remains that “it would be a very good thing if for just once all of us who live here would acknowledge the serious mistrust that exists between large segments of the New Bedford’s minority community and the police department.”

Spillane also noted that the Police based their entire refutation of CFJJ’s report on a questionable discrepancy: “The police statement took pains to paint as serious errors what to others could easily be construed as simple disagreements over what numbers should be counted. […] To be fair, whatever errors are in the report because of multiple counting would apply to the numbers of both Black and non-Black residents, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic individuals. So it’s hard to see how its conclusions would be any different than they were.”

You can view a video of the Zoom presentation of the CFJJ report here, the report itself here, and the slides used in CFJJ’s presentation here. You can also read CFJJ’s reply to the New Bedford Police criticism here. But it’s hard to argue with the numbers — particularly since they came from the police themselves and they only confirm what a similar 2015 study of NBPD field observations showed: New Bedford cops employ racial profiling on a grand scale.

I will cite Spillane again because he sums it up perfectly: “Flawed or not, the Citizens for Juvenile Justice report was a badly needed and serious effort to raise issues about the equity of policing in New Bedford. It was a long overdue attempt to start a discussion with the city’s political and law enforcement establishment about what often amounts to an occupying-force approach to policing in New Bedford. It is an attempt at a data-driven study that the city itself should have done long ago.”

Local police defenders may prefer denial and smears of police critics to actually contending with the data, but that can’t erase the fact that America has a policing problem tied to a long racist legacy. New Bedford is just one of thousands of local police forces that share those problems and that legacy. New Bedford can fix the problems locally — or wait for change to be imposed. After 70 years on this planet, and knowing more than a little about my “people,” I guarantee you it will be the latter.

Wednesday’s presentation by Citizens for Juvenile Justice was extremely powerful and damning. New Bedford has serious policing problems. The departure of a police chief will leave both a vacuum and uncertainty about what sort of leadership replaces him. And the city has a mayor who couldn’t be bothered to attend the unveiling of a study of 5,000 police stops, all of which took place over the last 5 years of his incumbency. Thankfully, New Bedford has many friends and residents who do care.

After the killings of Erik Aguilar and Malcolm Gracia by New Bedford police — which alone cost the city $1.5 million in settlements — all the same conditions still exist today and it is only a matter of time until New Bedford experiences another police killing. Action is needed to fix bad policing both at the national, state, and municipal level.

Some people may not like hearing it, but the heart of the problem of police killings is American racism. While police forces and sheriffs may no longer officially be the slave catchers they were created to be, their modern counterparts still control and surveil Black and brown neighborhoods like military occupiers. Indeed, many of today’s police officers have had recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. And aided by the Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 program, America’s police forces not only look like military occupations but use identical equipment.

As CFJJ reported, people in non-white New Bedford neighborhoods feel that the NBPD “essentially operates as an occupying force in poor neighborhoods of color.” For the most part, White America’s neighborhoods are spared this bad- and over-policing. While many white Americans have joined the calls for police reform, many more simply don’t want to know what goes on elsewhere.

But thanks to body cameras and mobile devices we are finally seeing just how bad 21st Century policing in America really is. And this includes police training. Whether it’s de-escalation, dealing with mentally-ill people, or the finer points of patrolling neighborhoods, America’s police basically don’t have a clue. And this is precisely as designed. Because the goal of America’s police forces is not so much to “protect and to serve” as it is to keep Black and brown people in line.

Time and time again mental health emergencies turn into police slayings. Time and time again traffic stops result in a homicide. Time and time again authoritarian police “compliance” rapidly resorts to force. Time and time again interrogations turn into tragedies. Given that police officers are trained intensively to kill with skilled center shots but lack training in psychology, social work, or any of the skills that might actually serve the public, it is no wonder that so many interactions end up with a Black or brown death. For this reason, we’ve seen numerous proposals to divert police funding into the hands of agencies that actually provide human and mental health services to the public. Let police investigate real crimes but leave the rest of human services to the real professionals.

Police impunity compounds aggressive over-policing, poor training, and the misplaced use of armed police officers for social services and traffic control by rewarding bad policing. The few cases we now see of officers being tried for homicide are a totally new phenomenon. And they have only come about as a result of public outrage. Unfortunately, these cases, rare as unicorns, do not represent a consistent commitment to racial justice in which police officers receive the same justice as everyone else. On the contrary, over decades police impunity has become enshrined in law thanks to a legal doctrine known as “Qualified Immunity.”

As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-7) wrote in a fact sheet to accompany H.R.1470, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act: “The court’s broad interpretation of this doctrine has allowed police to violate constitutional rights with impunity, providing officers immunity for everything from unlawful traffic stops to brutality and murder. Qualified immunity shields police from accountability, impedes true justice, and undermines the constitutional rights of every person in this country. It’s past time to end qualified immunity.” But, as of this moment, impunity is still the rule and the Chauvin trial the rarest of exceptions.

Compounding the structural defects mentioned previously is the absence of community control. Police departments are structured as paramilitary organizations whose members take orders from higher-ups. Therefore, just as we saw in the George Floyd killing, police usually defer to a ranking officer even when it is obvious that a murder by one of their own is in progress. Just ask former policewoman Cariol Horne, who was fired in 2008 for stopping a white officer from administering a lethal chokehold to a Black man. She didn’t “go along to get along” and it cost her a job and her pension.

In a society that refuses to see itself as a police state, why do we blindly accept that police departments look exactly like branches of the military? Who, actually, are police waging war against? Moreover, how is paramilitary organization consistent with fulfilling a municipal services function? And why are citizens completely locked out of managing police forces? You may not like the answer, but here it is anyway: because the goal of America’s police forces is not to “protect and to serve” but to keep Black and brown people in line. Public management of police departments would upend this function pretty quickly.

Following a killing, police are usually permitted to investigate themselves, with police unions setting the terms of investigations and interrogations. District attorneys, who have daily, fraternal, interactions with the police, almost always refuse to prosecute even the most egregious misconduct. We saw all this unfold after Malcolm Gracia’s murder, and America has seen it play out hundreds of thousands of times. The officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times? — he went back to work yesterday.

None of this is what any sane person would call justice. In fact, the bitter phrase “criminal justice” has become such a cruel joke that many of us can’t manage to put those words between our teeth. America may fancy itself as a nation of laws, but each time someone charged with enforcing laws breaks them with impunity while elected representatives look the other way, it shreds our democracy a little bit more.

National and state legislation is needed to set us on a different course. As of this writing, only a handful of states have lifted qualified immunity for police officers. The Massachusetts House, which only very reluctantly passed a police reform bill in an overtime session last year, preserved Qualiifed Immunity after intense lobbying by police unions. This should tell you who many Massachusetts legislators really represent.

Last month the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R.1280, the George Floyed Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which addresses policing practices and law enforcement accountability. It increases accountability for police misconduct, requires more transparency and data collection, and eliminates discriminatory policing practices. It also enables federal prosecution of unconstitutional practices by state and local law enforcement, limits qualified immunity in some cases, authorizes the DOJ to subpoena police departments more easily, create a police misconduct database, and mandates the body cameras and the reporting of incidents where force was used. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful this legislation will clear the Senate.

Changes to policing policy, such as the 19 recommendations Citizens for Juvenile Justice offered New Bedford residents, can make a big difference. For too long police forces have not only enjoyed complete impunity but also relative freedom from public controls and mandates. These at least represent policy changes. But they are recommendations, not absolute requirements. For that you need legislation. Yet too many mayors and city councilors habitually defer to the police on police matters while hypocritically micromanaging schools and other municipal departments. Too many legislators defer to police, sheriffs, or police unions. This sloppy, lazy governance has contributed to sloppy, unaccountable policing — precisely what is to be found in most of America’s police departments.

One obvious solution is to vote more wisely. But let’s not be naive. Those who want to preserve 21st Century American policing are constantly told that, without the police having carte blanche (run that through Google Translate some time) anarchy would rein and blood would run in the streets. What they really mean is — without police impunity the Black and brown people would rise up and overrun us.

In the end only complete citizen control of police forces, including the end of Qualified Immunity, will change the structure, practices, reporting, investigations, hiring and firing, discipline, and prosecution of bad cops. Instead of a primary mission to subdue the non-white population, police might then actually start serving communities who hire them.

On January 6th — in addition to avowed white supremacy and conspiracy groups — a number of firefighters, police officers, and military reservists joined the mob storming the nation’s Capitol building. In some cases they severely beat fellow law enforcement officers, in other cases flashed police credentials to gain unlawful entry into the Capitol. Law enforcement agencies around the country conducted internal investigations, and some officers have already been fired.

Yet neither the New Bedford Police, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department, nor the Dartmouth Police Department conducted internal investigations into officers who might have participated in the insurrection. The New Bedford Mayor’s office referred inquires about investigations to the FBI. Chief Cordeiro told a Zoom meeting much the same. A Dartmouth Police spokeswoman said that “at this time” there was no investigation. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office simply refused to answer our question.

The most charitable explanation is that local law enforcement agencies are waiting to see if the FBI turns up anything. A less charitable, but far more likely, explanation is that police and sheriff’s department are showing their usual disinterest in investigating their own, even for crimes that would permanently disqualify them from serving in any law enforcement capacity ever again. Unfortunately, the public has come to expect responses like this from police agencies that operate with increasing impunity.

Historically, the nation’s sheriffs have been closely identified with slave patrols and white supremacy. Our own local sheriff is a spokesman for the white supremacist anti-immigrant group FAIR, state campaign chair for America’s first openly white supremacist President, and spent considerable time attempting to ingratiate himself with white supremacist presidential immigration advisor Stephen Miller, as information requests by the ACLU, Political Research Associates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and others reveal. Sheriffs have a long history of racist impunity, as many remember from the Jim Crow era. Since those days, sadly, not enough has changed.

The nation’s police forces are part of a criminal justice system that Elizabeth Warren took heat for calling “racist, top to bottom.” It ought to be unnecessary to point out, especially after George Floyd’s murder, that police forces, especially, have major problems with disproportionate killings, arrests, and assaults on people of color. But then there are the white supremacist chat rooms — from Facebook, Twitter, Gab, and Parler, to Stormfront and others — where a disproportionate number of participants are law enforcement or members of the military.

A 2019 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of police were members of neo-Confederate, militia, or white supremacist Facebook groups. The Plain View Project created a database of Facebook posts from self-identified police officers in just eight of America’s 350 cities and found tens of thousands of racist posts by police officers endorsing racial violence and bigotry. What would they have found in the nation’s 15,000+ small towns and in the remaining 342 cities?

In 2010 New Bedford Police officer Paul Hodson encountered a disturbed Guatemalan man and, within three minutes, had killed him by first pepper-spraying him and then kneeling on his back. Hodson, who was only removed from the NBPD after being convicted of child pornography charges, was known to post racist content on social media. The Standard Times printed some of his tame contributions: “After having a great time over the past 2 days spending time with friends and family, its back to work to deal with the scum of the earth,” he posted in 2011. “Time to go to work and violate some civil rights.”

Police forces historically do nothing about racism in the ranks. In the 1990’s a white supremacist gang, the “Vikings,” operated with impunity right under the noses of the brass of the Los Angeles Police Department. Klan affiliations of police and sheriffs were well-known during the Civil Rights years, and police today continue the tradition of breaking Black heads by treating Black Lives Matter activists as terrorists for simply demanding accountability or posting fantasies about running protestors over with their cruisers.

And if you think New Bedford is different from other communities, think again.

Former Bristol County Sheriff’s detective Peter Larkin, who went to work for the New Bedford Schools, was fired in 2019 for posting his own disturbed racist fantasy on Facebook. Angry at Black Lives Matter people protesting in New York City, Larkin wrote, “I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.” Is this an example of a someone who needs psychological help – or was Larkin simply posturing for fellow ex-cops who drink from the same racist cup?

Whatever the causes — hiring the wrong people or habitually refusing to hold “bad apples” accountable — police racism is both systemic and a self-inflicted societal wound that only radical reform and public control can fix.

The events of January 6th, which far too many law enforcement officers particpated in, provides one more example of why public oversight of police is crucial. Police simply can’t be trusted to investigate themselves. And why would any sensible person even expect them to?

If local law enforcement officers are found to have participated in the January 6^th insurrection, they must be immediately dismissed, stripped of their pensions, and never permitted to betray the Constitution or the public trust again. But since local law enforcement agencies won’t do it themselves, let municipalities investigate. If municipalities won’t do it, then let the state Attorney General conduct credible investigations.

The time for taking white supremacy within the ranks of law enforcement seriously is long overdue.

We know that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts neither the schools nor the police are collecting adequate data on school-based offenses. This is not to single-out New Bedford. It reflects a state-wide, if not a national, lack of interest in tracking at-risk youth.

Many types of data describing the process of a child moving through the juvenile justice system — from schools, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), police, district attorneys, courts, probation, the Department of Youth Services, federal DOE and DOJ mandated data — must be analyzed in order to answer two critical questions about School Resource Officers: (1) does the presence of armed police in schools actually deter violence and mass shootings? and (2) is there a risk to children, particularly children of color, of disproportionate discipline and their early introduction into the criminal justice system?

However, there is some data, and we need to look at it. In January the NAACP New Bedford branch hosted a community discussion of SROs and juvenile justice. One of the invited organizations looked at data which school collect and turn over to DESE. Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CFJJ) obtained DESE data on school discipline in Massachusetts Gateway Cities. Aggregated data is published on the DESE site and there it is possible to look at specific infractions by school or by district. For example, you can find the New Bedford schools here:

From this data we find that in 2018-2019, out of 13,811 students in the entire district, 35 were disciplined for weapons (types unspecified), 69 for threats to other students, zero for sexual assault, 70 for fighting, 508 for battery (which includes any form of contact such as shoving or spitting), 65 for illegal substances, zero for felonies, and 5 for bullying.

But the New Bedford Public Schools already knows this. It’s their data.

The relative absence of violent crime in these numbers suggests that SROs are either unnecessary or are preventing serious crimes currently not being documented. Without data or specifics it is impossible to know which is the case. As the Justice Policy Institute has documented, schools have disciplined and expelled children just for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. To determine if armed police are actually needed in the New Bedford schools, a better analysis of disciplinary cases, then, is necessary to determine which cases actually rose to the level of a crime.

CFJJ obtained the raw data behind the DESE numbers in order to look at discipline by race, gender, disability, economic status, and language.

Using this data CFJJ prepared a statistical analysis for each Gateway City. The New Bedford analysis was one of them. CFJJ looked at overall discipline by race, discipline for students with a disability, students economically disadvantaged, and students whose first language is not English.

The NAACP New Bedford branch obtained CFJF’s DESE data extract. You can download it here. It was possible to reproduce CFJJ’s results and also to crunch the data in additional ways. For example, we can view high school and middle school discipline with greater granularity, and by school. You can download an extract for the New Bedford schools here.

The DESE-supplied data relies on Excel Autofilters, which anyone familiar with the software should be able to apply.

Then, using Excel’s charts, visual respresentations of the data can be produced:

While CFJJ’s Gateway City report looked at discipline by the percentage of, for example, Black students over all students disciplined, it is also possible to look at the percentage of Black students disciplined over only Black students. We found that, within each racial group, Black males were always the statistically most likely to be disciplined — reflecting what national research already shows — even when they represented a smaller proportion of total disciplinary cases.

For example, the chart above for Roosevelt Middle School shows that almost one out of three Black males were disciplined while only one out of five white males were. In fact, the discriminatory over-discipline of Black males is a feature throughout all New Bedford non-elementary schools and also at Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech, whose numbers we also obtained.

Similar analyses can be done for non-English-speakers, students with disabilities, and those living in poverty. As both the ACLU and the American Bar Association point out, students of color with disabilities are especially likely to be injected into the school-to-prison pipeline.

The Sentencing Project recently released a report on racial disparities in youth incarceration in the United States. Guess which state had the 9th worst disparity in Black youth incarceration? Massachusetts. And guess which state was Number One in incarceration disparities for Latino children? Massachusetts. And this follows significant 2018 reforms affecting youth in the criminal justice system.

So why is all this important? Because SROs are frequently asked to handle disciplinary matters that have nothing to do with crimes, and the DESE data CFJJ has published shows that school officials who may ask SROs to intercede are more likely to discipline children of color.

Until the New Bedford Public Schools can prove that the benefits outweigh the risks, we call on Superintendent Anderson to suspend, immediately, their SRO program with the New Bedford Police.

Downloads

• CFJJ / DESE Collection
• NAACP Extract for New Bedford

The 192nd General Court of the Massachusetts Legislature is considering a number of bills related to school resource officers.

The Chapter 69 Criminal Justice reforms and Chapter 253 police reforms now give school superintendents complete discretion to run SRO programs. New legislation also requires schools to collect discipline and arrest data, which for the most part they have failed to do. With school resource officers being advertised by both police departments and school districts as “mentors” and “teachers,” and with even some SROs admitting they are often pressured into being used as disciplinarians by school staff, several new bills make it clear that police in schools are not to replace professional support staff and that their role is solely to deal with clear criminal activity.

• HD.2534 – Lindsay N. Sabadosa (D-First Hampshire) has proposed HD.2534, An Act relative to the location of school resource officers. This bill removes SROs from school grounds and makes it clear that SROs will never replace school counselors, psychologists, or disciplinarians.

• SD.2043 – Harriet L. Chandler (D-First Worcester) has proposed SD.2043, An Act relative to safer schools. This bill makes it clear that SROs will not (i) serve as school disciplinarians, enforcers of school regulations or in place of licensed school psychologists, psychiatrists or counselors; and (ii) use police powers to address traditional school discipline issues, including non-violent disruptive behavior. The bill also prohibits SROs from intervening in all but clearly criminal acts.

• HD.3090 – Kay Khan (D-11th Middlesex) has proposed HD.3090, An Act relative to safer schools. This bill makes it clear that SROs will not (i) serve as school disciplinarians, enforcers of school regulations or in place of licensed school psychologists, psychiatrists or counselors; and (ii) use police powers to address traditional school discipline issues, including non-violent disruptive behavior. The bill also prohibits SROs from intervening in all but clearly criminal acts.

• SD.180 – Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-Second Suffolk) has proposed SD.180, An Act to prioritize violence prevention and social emotional health in school support staff hiring. In the event that schools keep SROs, it should not be at the expense of professional support staff. This bill requires at least seven “Mental and social emotional health support personnel” for every SRO and requires DESE to document compliance.

• HD.2748 – Brandy Fluker Oakley (D-12th Suffolk) has proposed HD.2748, An Act to prioritize violence prevention and social emotional health in school support staff hiring. In the event that schools keep SROs, it should not be at the expense of professional support staff. This bill requires at least seven “Mental and social emotional health support personnel” for every SRO and requires DESE to document compliance.

Republicans didn’t care much for the Chapter 69 Criminal Justice reforms passed in 2018 and no sooner did the Chapter 253 police reforms go into effect on January 1st than they began devising ways to return to the good old days when police controlled school hallways, not superintendents.

• SD.856 – Patrick M. O’Connor (R-Plymouth and Norfolk) has proposed SD.856, An Act Creating a School Resource Officer Grant Program and Fund. This bill establishes a state-administered fund to be shared only with communities who adopt SRO programs, and funds must be matched by local communities. The Commissioner of Public Safety (a political appointment) appears to exert significant influence in grant awards.

• SD.857 – Patrick M. O’Connor (R-Plymouth and Norfolk) has proposed SD.857, An Act promoting local control and effective training of school resource officers. This bill returns appointments of SROs exclusively to police chiefs, despite the title’s claim to restore community control.

• SD.2171 – Bruce E. Tarr (R-First Essex and Middlesex) has proposed SD.2171, An Act relative to school safety issues. This bill replaces superintendent’s discretionary appointment of SROs with an appointment by the Commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Two additional bills with SRO provisions from James Arciero and Walter Timilty seem to be cases of Democrats pandering to the police lobby. A third stange bill from Cynthia Creem is sure to offer both opponents of SROs and opponents of gun control something to jointly despise.

• HD.2052 – James Arciero (D-2nd Middlesex) has proposed HD.2052, Resolve establishing an Enhanced Public School Safety Commission. This resolution would create a commission to study placing bulletproof glass, classroom surveillance, and retired police officers in schools.

• SD.769 – Walter F. Timilty (D-Norfolk, Bristol and Plymouth) has proposed SD.769, An Act relative to school safety and security. This bill involves school resource officers in a requirement to hold live intruder drills within 90 days of the beginning of the school year.

• SD.1506 – Cynthia Stone Creem (D-1st Middlesex and Norfolk) has proposed SD.1506, An Act relative to firearms and firearms violence. This bill sets up a Firearms Violence Prevention Trust Fund, which among other things, prioritizes “programs that support the provision of school resource officers.” Revenue for the fund comes from a 4.5% tax on guns and ammunition sales.

On February 3rd the Sentencing Project published a new study, Racial Disparities in Youth Incarceration Persist, by Josh Rovner, Senior Advocate Associate at the Sentencing Project. It examines disparities in arrests of white children and children of color, and it does not paint an encouraging picture.

For the NAACP the findings are no surprise. Black, Native, and Latino youth have been historically disciplined and arrested in disproportionate numbers and make up a lopsided percentage of those who are fed into the criminal justice system.

The good news from the study is that in the last decade youth incarceration has been cut in half. The bad news is that, for children of color, they are still targets of overzealous and racist policing and school discipline. Disparities in Latino youth incarceration have dropped by 21% — still not on par with national improvement — but Black and Native youth incarceration disparities have remained “essentially unchanged” in the last decade.

The Sentencing Project study quotes Tufts University Sociologist Daaniki Gordon, who notes that “police are […] more likely to intervene in behavior by youth of color that would go unremarked or ignored by police in neighborhoods where white youth predominantly live. Residential segregation leads to school segregation, and students of color often experience their misbehaviors treated as a disciplinary or policing issue while their white peers’ misbehaviors are more frequently seen as behavioral health concerns, potentially meriting a modified curriculum and additional school support personnel to assist with behavioral needs.”

As the study notes, criminalization of children of color often begins with, and right in, the schools. With very good reason schools have been correctly identified as the first stop in the school-to-prison pipeline. It is NAACP policy that armed police have no place in school hallways. Now that Massachusetts police reform has given school superintendents complete discretion over SRO programs, especially with case after case after case after case after case after case of children abused by SROs, it is up to school superintendents to prove that these programs do no harm to children of color. We call on Superintendent Thomas Anderson to stop the SRO program immediately and prove to city residents that it serves some positive function.

While Massachusetts has the fifth lowest youth incarceration rate in the United States, these low rates do not extend to Black, Native or Latino Children. Massachusetts has the ninth highest disparity between Black and white youth incarceration rates and is #1 in disparity in the nation between Latino and white youth incarceration — and it’s only worsening.

The Sentencing Project has offered three recommendations for state, city, and school policy makers:

1. Racial impact statements: States and localities should require the use of racial impact statements to educate policymakers about how changes in sentencing or law enforcement policies and practices might impact racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system.
2. Publish demographic data quarterly: States and counties should publish demographic data quarterly on the number of incarcerated or justice-system involved youth, including race and ethnicity. The federal government should disseminate this information nationwide.
3. Invest in communities: States and localities must invest in communities to strengthen public infrastructures, such as schools and medical and mental health services, with particular focus on accommodating the needs of children of color.

Let’s look at how these are — or are not — being addressed currently.

As we learned in last week’s forum on Juvenile Justice and School Resource Officers, racial impact and racial justice are poorly-considered factors in both school and policing policy, or are simply not considered at all. Juvenile justice data is either not collected — in violation of state law — or it must be obtained by FOIA request or lawsuit. And budget priorities for communities frequently overlook social and human services in favor of simply throwing more money at policing.

The NAACP believes that this study adds to what many Americans have finally woken up to — that the American criminal justice system is deeply racist and needs much more reform than the band-aids and minimal reforms that timid legislators have come up with to-date.

You can download a PDF of the full Sentencing Project study from their website.

As of January 1st, 2021 Massachusetts law on School Resource Officers (SROs) has changed.

In past years the deployment of SRO’s was entirely up to the Chief of Police. But the choice of whether to place armed police in schools is now entirely up to school superintendents.

When Governor Baker signed S.2963, the compromise police reform bill, it redefined many elements of the SRO program, striking Section 37P in its entirety, and now gives superintendents the final word on whether they want armed police in district schools:

“(d) For the purpose of fostering a safe and healthy environment for all students through strategic and appropriate use of law enforcement resources and to achieve positive outcomes for youth and public safety, a chief of police, at the request of the superintendent and subject to appropriation, shall assign at least 1 school resource officer to serve the city, town, commonwealth charter school, regional school district or county agricultural school. In the case of a regional school district, commonwealth charter school or county agriculture school, the chief of police of the city or town in which the school is located shall, at the request of the superintendent, assign the school resource officer who may be the same officer for all schools in the city or town.”

I’ve attached a PDF of the legislation.

The New Bedford schools, which last October kicked off a community “conversation” with a propaganda video supporting SROs, have now enlisted community members to help improve the program. But instead of improving the optics of their SRO program, the school district now needs to justify its continued existence. And there are two questions the School Superintendent must answer:

1. what risks do placing armed police in schools pose to children, particularly children of color?
2. has the police presence in schools actually kept children safe and deterred rampage shootings?

The NAACP New Bedford Branch is sponsoring a community discussion on January 28th from 6-7PM via Zoom which may offer some answers to these questions — questions the schools ought to be asking as well. The panel will feature: Leon Smith, Seq., Executive Director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice; Dr. Ricardo Rosa, Co-Chair of New Bedford Coalition to Save Our Schools; Matthew Cregor, Staff Attorney at Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee; and will be moderated by NAACP member Moriah Wiggins.

Everyone is welcome to attend. Connect via Zoom at 6PM on Thursday, January 28th: