SDPD take-down of African American woman in OB, summer 2020.
By Jesse Marx and Sofía Mejías Pascoe / Voice of San Diego / June 17, 2021
A long-awaited analysis of San Diego Police Department data, conducted by an outside think tank, was released Thursday, June 17, and offers a familiar picture of the disparities that people of color face when encountering law enforcement. But the police chief and the report’s authors have said they don’t believe it’s appropriate to attribute such disparities to officer bias.
SDPD has pushed back against previous studies of this nature, contending that the researchers were either politically motivated or didn’t consider the full picture. The new report doesn’t just compare police stops, searches and use of force against local population demographics, it took internal and external factors into consideration, including crime rates, poverty rates, the behavior of community members and individual officers.
While the report leaves open the possibility that racial bias exists within the ranks, its authors have made clear that they do not believe it’s possible to use data to get inside the minds of officers and understand their intentions. Although SDPD has criticized other analyses by outside groups, the latest one mirrors the findings of those efforts.
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