State Police to track profiling data
Toolbox
By Peter Hirschfeld Vermont Press Bureau - Published: November 13, 2009
MONTPELIER – If you ask Maj. Bill Sheets, head of the Vermont State Police's Support Services Division, whether Vermont's uniformed state police troopers are guilty of racial profiling, he answers with an unequivocal "No."
"I'm confident there is nobody that works in the Vermont State Police that is stopping somebody based upon their race," Sheets said Thursday.
It's an answer one of the nation's foremost experts on the subject has heard before.
"I think every police officer in America says that," said Jack Devitt, a professor of criminology from Northeastern University who spoke Thursday to state police officers about racial profiling.
Despite the sure assessment of his own troops' integrity, Sheets is an enthusiastic proponent of the data-collection initiative Vermont's largest police force will soon undertake in an effort to expose, and root out, any biased policing that does exist.
"This really fits in nicely with our bias-fee policing philosophy," Sheets said. "First and foremost, it's the right thing to do. There's nothing to fear for us, and it lends itself to a level of transparency and accountability we want to have with the communities we serve."
The state police have become the latest, and largest, Vermont police force to institute data-collection protocols, joining four Chittenden County agencies that have started tracking the race and ethnicity of motorists pulled over in traffic stops.
Vermont State Police are one of only two or three state police agencies nationwide, McDevitt said, that don't already perform race-oriented data collection. Before local departments in Burlington, South Burlington, Winooski and the University of Vermont began collecting data in January, Vermont stood alone with Mississippi as the only two states in the country without any data-collection protocols whatsoever.
The advent of data collection here follows closely on the heels of a report by the 17-member Vermont Human Rights Commission that found a perception among people of color that racial profiling does exist. The 50-page report recounted anecdotal accounts of racial profiling incidents, and called upon police departments to begin collecting data in traffic stops to see if the perception might be real.
"We were not on a witch hunt," Curtiss Reed, head of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity and chairman of the Vermont Commission on Human Rights said Thursday. "The purpose of the report was not to point fingers, uncover skeletons or otherwise look for scapegoats. What we were looking for were promising practices that both law enforcement and community members could equally support that would focus attention on bias-free policing."
McDevitt called data-collection an effective mechanism for identifying police bias that has sparked reforms in other states. He said police officers who engage in racial profiling aren't necessarily racist, and may not be aware of their own bias.
"It's the notion of unconscious bias. We have associations in our heads about race and crime, and what we're trying to do is say we all have that – college professors, police officers, lawyers," McDevitt said. "The exciting part about understanding this is if we can use something like data collection to show somebody is doing this, they can stop it, and often are very eager to stop it."
According to the 2005 Census, Vermont is among the most racially homogenous states in the country. Reed though says the demographics are shifting quickly. Racial and ethnic minorities account for nearly a third of the population growth in Vermont, and minorities comprise about 7 percent of the school-age population – nearly double the rate in the general population.
"The bottom line is that one of the core values in Vermont is community," Reed said. "So how do we bring this community that serves to protect us together in a way that is consistent with those values of trust and accountability?"
McDevitt said he was impressed by the reception he received Thursday from state police. Unlike other areas of the country, where he met with suspicion and resistance, McDevitt said, Vermont troopers have embraced the data-collection concept.
"And that's really unique. Usually people are a little bit defensive," McDevitt said. "I don't think I've ever worked with an agency that has taken this issue more seriously."
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