The New Virginia Majority met at the Sacred Heart Center with parents and several member of the Richmond School Board to push for more bilingual resources at Richmond Public Schools. Latino parents got an opportunity to speak about their experiences with the school system. Fidelina Arellano Guiterrez, with her daughter, talked about her experience with the school system.
A coalition of community activists is renewing calls for more transparency from Richmond police after the department said it could not provide data on “stop-and-frisk” encounters and traffic stops.
“Working poor, and minority communities, particularly African-American, are being unfairly targeted by police stops,” according to the group, led by New Virginia Majority, a statewide civic engagement organization, and assisted by attorneys at the Legal Aid Justice Center.
The activists’ evidence is purely anecdotal, based on stories and complaints they’ve collected from residents at community meetings and door knocking in areas of the city with large minority populations. So they requested data through the Freedom of Information Act from the police to confirm what they’d been hearing from community members.
In its response to the groups, the Richmond Police Department said it doesn’t “have a way to extract the data” and that it would require someone to review every encounter or traffic stop to retrieve the data. The department cited an exemption in the state FOIA law that does not require it to make a new report.
A police spokesman said the department plans to try to provide the information in the future.
In response, the New Virginia Majority is planning a march on Monday from the Mayo Bridge to the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail site to demand more accountability and transparency from the department.
“While it’s possible that RPD may not have the IT capability currently to produce all the data we’ve requested, we absolutely believe they have the capability to produce some of the information,” said Kim Rolla, an attorney with the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Program at the Legal Aid Justice Center. “And their response was to produce no information at all.”
The request Rolla made on behalf of the coalition was extensive, and yet “granular” by design, she said. She began with a broad request for the total number of civilians stopped, then drilled down from there, asking how many of those stops resulted in frisks or searches; how many of those revealed contraband; the disposition of the stop, whether the person was arrested, given a summons or a warning; and asking for any demographic information about the person stopped including race, ethnicity, gender, age and location where the person was stopped.
“We thought the stories, the horrific stories, the horrible stories of interactions with police in South Richmond and downtown were sufficient,” said Assaddique Muhammad Abdul-Rahman, a community organizer for New Virginia Majority. “Until one of the liaisons for one of our local politicians said the City Council needs data. They want us not to be anecdotally based but evidence-based. We want to prove that our neighborhoods are or are not being targeted.”
The practice of stop-and-frisk, also known as “Terry stops,” has been controversial since the 1960s, when the “U.S. Supreme Court held in the landmark case Terry v. Ohio that the Fourth Amendment is not violated as long as the search is brief and the officer has reason to believe that the suspect may be armed and dangerous, and the purpose of the search is to preserve the safety of officers and others,” said Dana G. Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police and Foundation.
In 2013, a federal court deemed part of New York City’s stop-and-frisk program unconstitutional as black and Hispanic people were subject to stops and searches at a higher rate than whites.
A review by the Center for Constitutional Rights revealed that 87 percent of the 684,000 people stopped in New York City in 2011 were black and Latino, while only making up about 23 percent and 29 percent of the city’s total population, respectively.
“Over 10 years of raw data from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) reveal that stop-and-frisks result in a minimal yield of weapons and contraband,” the center said. “Moreover, the practice contributes to continued mistrust, doubt and fear of police officers in communities of color that are already scarred by systemic racial profiling and major incidents of police brutality.”
Yet the practice continued, though it was curtailed, and early last year the NYPD agreed to further curb the practice following a series of lawsuits, according to an article in The New York Times.
In Charlottesville, an annual review of police data by The Daily Progress revealed more than 70 percent of all people stopped there in 2017 were black. The pattern follows a four-year trend.
“I’m not saying that’s what happening in Richmond, because I don’t know,” Rolla said. “I don’t have the data. [The police] should want to be able to answer these questions.”
Schrad, head of the state police chiefs’ organization, said the association “does not discourage the use of stop-and-frisk procedures, because they are essential to protecting the safety of the officer or third parties who could be seriously injured by an armed suspect.”
She said officers should be trained, and use restraint when utilizing the procedure, and limit the length to “what is necessary to secure the safety of the officer and bystanders.”
“Because stop-and-frisk data is situational, it would be misleading to try to create a stop-and-frisk database since the data cannot be fairly compared from case to case,” she said. “To do the required analysis to get any value out of comparative data would be both time-consuming and expensive, and may not be worth the expense on limited police budgets.”
Police in Chesterfield and Henrico counties provided similar responses as Richmond, saying they don’t specifically track stop-and-frisk data, and it would take an enormous effort to do so.
Richmond police spokesman Gene Lepley said the department didn’t deny the request for information.
“The response was conciliatory,” he said in an email. “We don’t have the data to share. We’re going to try to find a way to provide it going forward.”
The New Virginia Majority successfully petitioned the department last year to provide its use-of-force and complaint data online. The requests are part of an overall push toward more transparency and civilian oversight. The group is petitioning for a citizen review board to handle complaints against officers and use-of-force investigations.
“Police have no business policing the police, because they can’t police the civilians without discrimination or disparate treatment,” Abdul-Rahman said. “They can’t police objectively. So how do they police themselves objectively?”
The “power march” will begin at 7:30 p.m. Monday from the south end of the Mayo Bridge, or 14th Street, and end at the Lumpkin’s site.
