Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

The Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association today announced a plan to prevent biased policing, even as it continued to deny that the police engage in racial profiling in traffic stops.

The plan calls for more sophisticated training and management policies to deal with the perceived problem of bias and a fresh look at the psychological screening of officers to ensure that prejudiced individuals are not hired.

Studies by Northeastern University researchers show that blacks and Latinos are twice as likely to have their cars searched as are whites but that contraband is found more often in cars driven by whites.

Flawed news reporting over the years has tended to exaggerate the perceived problem of racial profiling, Pawtucket Police Chief George L. Kelley III, association president, said said in announcing the effort, in Pawtucket. Officers search motor vehicles infrequently, he emphasized.

Kelley said association members took an in-depth look at a six-month sample of 2005 statewide data and found that there were 61 searches in about 9,000 traffic stops, or less than 1 percent. Thirty-six of the vehicles searched were operated by nonwhites and 25 by whites, and 9 nonwhites and 6 whites were arrested as a result of the stops and searches, he said.

In reviewing the searches, he said, the police found that there were rationales for each of them, such as vehicles that lacked proper registration. It is Pawtucket Police Deparrtment policy, for example, to search any vehicle with an invalid registration, he
said.
"We're not looking at big numbers," Kelley said.

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