Officials in the town of St. Anthony, Minnesota, the record suggests, just didn’t want to know. The small police force in this Twin Cities suburb declined an invitation to share data with a state-commissioned study in 2003 of racial profiling in traffic stops.
The town of St. Anthony shrugged this issue off, but today, residents in a neighboring town patrolled by the same police force are waking up to injustice – and steeling themselves to fight it.
They are speaking out because it was in their community, Falcon Heights, that a 32-year-old black man by the name of Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer after being pulled over July 6 for driving with a cracked taillight.
St. Anthony was the patron saint of lost things. The town that bears the Italian priest’s name should be searching now for its own conscience.
Residents clearly are – and they provide an example to an emotionally battered nation. Last Wednesday, residents lined up before the Falcon Heights City Council to call for the end to policing practices that appear to target minority drivers. One resident, Chuck Johnson, used characteristic Midwestern directness in registering his opposition: “I don’t want this to be done in my name in the town anymore.”
Castile’s dying was broadcast live on his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook feed, then seen by millions. That remarkable video may finally awaken white America to the injustice of racially biased traffic enforcement, the problem known to those it targets as “driving while black.”
Moral outrage is compelling people in Falcon Heights to stand up and be counted. Several times here in the Valley in recent days, hundreds of others have also gathered to decry the fact that safe passage along public roads can depend on one’s race.
The Northampton Police Department, for one, is taking deliberate steps to root out racial differences in traffic enforcement. This fall, a final group of officers will participate in training designed to help them see and confront “implicit bias.”
The attorney for Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who shot Castile, has faulted Castile for failing to comply with the officer’s directives. But Castile’s death was ruled a homicide and Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton was quick to say Castile would not have been shot if he was white. From Poland, President Obama noted both Castile’s shooting and the earlier death of Alton Sterling and called them “symptomatic of a broader set of racial inequalities that exist in our criminal justice system.”
The year 2003, when the study of racial profiling in Minnesota took shape, was about the time Castile began driving. Over the next 13 years, Castile was stopped by police 49 times, the New York Times reported, or an average of once every three months.
He at times lost his license for offenses that pose legitimate risks to public safety, such as driving without insurance or speeding.
But on the day Castile died, the only reason a police officer had to pull him over was a cracked taillight. Other times, it had been turning into a parking lot without signaling.
Or failure to repair a seatbelt. Or driving with an unlit license plate. Or driving, in a borrowed car, with tinted windows.
The study that St. Anthony didn’t want to be part of found that minority drivers in Minnesota were more likely than white drivers to be stopped and searched, a clear suggestion that law enforcement is not color-blind in that state.
A 2015 analysis by the New York Times of tens of thousands of traffic stops in Greensboro, North Carolina, found that cars driven by African-Americans were searched more than twice as often as cars driven by white people.
A broader study by the American Civil Liberties Union calculated that in the Minneapolis area, African-Americans and Native Americans were eight times more likely than while people to face charges for trespassing or loitering.
The St. Anthony Police Department didn’t join that 2003 study, but statistics suggest bias in traffic enforcement. In the towns its officers patrol, African-Americans made up 8 percent of the population in 2015 but received 19 percent of all tickets issued – and account for 41 percent of arrests.
At a recent rally in downtown Northampton, some African-Americans who participated questioned the role white people can and should play in this issue.
It’s a fair question, but it would be wrong to expect them to do nothing — to stand silently as a majority while bias against a minority goes unchanged and unchallenged.
Decent people everywhere should mourn and speak out when anger, hatred and guns combine in convulsive violence.
Chuck Johnson set a good example in Falcon Heights last week with his simple statement: Not in my name.