At a pool party in 2015, white police officer David Eric Casebolt slammed black teenager Dajerria Becton to the ground and pinned her down with his knee. Now she has sued him, as well as the city and police department, for the psychological damage the incident caused her, citing excessive force and seeking $5 million in damages. Becton was only 15 at the time and was an invited guest to the party, which took place in a predominantly white neighborhood in McKinney, Texas. Another black teenager, Tatiana Rhodes, and her mother were organizing a cookout at a community pool as an end of the school year get-together for classmates. They live in the area.

A cellphone video that went viral shows Becton starting to walk away from the situation after police officers show up, but Casebolt runs over to her and pins her to the ground with a knee in her back. He also pulls her hair and shoves her face down in the ground while she pleads to see her mother. When some boys come up and tell the officer to let her go, he draws his gun at the unarmed teenagers. Many who saw the video thought it was clear that Casebolt overreacted, and he resigned from his position within a few days.

Rhodes, the girl who organized the party, said that it all started when a couple of white women at the pool started aiming racial slurs at the teenagers, calling them names, and saying that they should go back to their Section 8 homes. One woman even reportedly slapped Rhodes in the face. In a Youtube video interview with Rhodes, her mother criticized the grown women for harassing children rather than talking to the parents. At some point during the party, someone called the police and claimed that a group of teenagers from out of town had showed up and started a fight. But the Rhodes family said that only classmates who were invited attended the party.

Becton’s lawyer Kim T. Cole said Thursday that the incident affected Becton psychologically and that she is struggling in school. She said, “I would hope that at a certain point she gets some counseling and kind of regains her life and confidence. Emotionally, she is a wreck.” Cole said that the physical injuries–abrasions, head and neck injuries—have healed, but that the emotional scars will remain. Becton has since received repeated threats, been the victim of cyberbullying, and become a target at her school. Cole also said that Becton is afraid to call the police if anything happens to her, as she doesn’t trust law enforcement officers now.

#Texan teenager unlawfully tackled by #police, sues the city for $5 million: https://t.co/QmlzwopSUB pic.twitter.com/7DrY2wI5cB

— The Voice Newspaper (@TheVoiceNews) January 5, 2017

The lawsuit cites excessive force, assault, and unlawful detention. But a spokeswoman from the city of McKinney denied all the allegations and wrote in a statement that the McKinney Police Department will defend itself vigorously. Casebolt’s lawyer, Jane Bishkin, said that he “let his emotions get the best of him.” He was allegedly stressed after responding to two suicide calls right before arriving at the pool party, one where a man had shot himself in front of his family and one where Casebolt managed to talk a teenage girl out of jumping from a roof. After resigning, he and his family received death threats and had to move to an undisclosed location.

Casebolt was also sued back in 2008 for allegedly abusing a black driver, Albert Earl Brown Jr., who claimed that the officer had yanked his pants down to his ankles during a roadside search. Brown said he was being racially profiled, and that Casebolt told a white woman who was in his car that she had made a mistake by hanging out with him. The case was dismissed as Brown had marijuana in his car and was jailed. But the fact that Casebolt has been at the center of two separate racial incidents has many believing this runs more deeply than misunderstandings or stress.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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As high-profile police shootings continue to hold the nation’s attention, a new study on the extent of racial bias in police officers’ use of force is making some big waves. In fact, this research comes to a particularly surprising conclusion: the police are actually less likely to shoot black civilians. But there are some important details to work through before we jump to any conclusions.

The study, conducted by renowned Harvard economist Roland Fryer, did identify some significant bias in the way police officers use force. This is a bias that exists at nearly all levels–like putting hands on a civilian, pushing a person up against a wall, using handcuffs on someone without arresting them, and even using pepper spray or a baton–but when it comes to lethal force, the most severe of all, police may actually be slightly less likely to kill black civilians.

But before we jump to conclusions or even accept that conclusion on its face, it’s important to sort through a large number of methodological nuance to understand what we can take away from this research. Fair warning, if you came here looking for a clear-cut conclusion, you’ll have to read the rest of this article to get the full picture.

Some Background

First, it’s important to point out that Roland Fryer’s study involved a significant undertaking by a team of researchers. And Fryer himself certainly wasn’t expecting the final conclusion. “It is the most surprising result of my career,” Fryer told the New York Times. The research is also still a working paper, which means that it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed and published in a formal journal. It was put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research for experts in the field to look at and discuss its findings prior to a more formal release.

The debate about police shootings is one that has notoriously had a lack of hard data to discuss. We simply don’t have good statistics on the number and characteristics of incidents when police officers used lethal force. Independent counts have started to fill this gap–of note are the Washington Post’s database of police shootings and the Guardian’s “The Counted” project–but there is little national data with the depth necessary to identify bias. With this research, Fryer and his team provide some important analysis to a discussion that has few statistics to draw from.

A look at the methods

So let’s take a closer look at the data and how it was used. To measure racial bias when it comes to all levels of force the researchers looked at statistics provided by several police departments, notably New York City’s “stop, question and frisk” program, as well as nationally representative survey data that measures interactions with the police. To look at the use of lethal force–officer-involved shootings–the researchers had to assemble their own dataset from 10 police departments in three states. The researchers managed to get a particularly interesting dataset from the Houston police department, which provided a large number of reports on interactions between police and civilians.

Of that Houston dataset, the researchers took a random sample of files with “arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justified: attempted capital murder of a public safety officer, aggravated assault on a public safety officer, resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest.” However, this data was unique to the Houston police department. The other police departments could only give details for instances when lethal force was used, but we would need data about when officers decided not to use force in order to properly identify the effects of bias.

The conclusions and what they mean

First, it’s important to note that the researchers only look at actual interactions between officers and civilians. This means that the study does not engage with one important racial bias in policing–that officers are more likely to stop and interact with black civilians than white civilians.

That caveat aside, when it comes to the lethal use of force, here’s how Fryer summarizes his findings:

Using data from Houston, Texas–where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified–we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites.

The researchers used the raw data referenced in the quote and then controlled for a range of factors–civilian behavior, possession of a weapon, the situational context, and much more–but still found no presence of bias in the use of lethal force by the Houston police department.

Importantly, this is only based on the Houston data, so while we may be able to conclude that officer-involved shootings in Houston are not subject to racial bias, we cannot really take that to mean that the same holds true nationally or for any other police department. Even then, this conclusion rests on the researchers’ ability to control for several important variables like behavior and context.

It is also important to note that this data came from police officer summaries of their interactions with civilians. While we cannot cast doubt on an entire police department, there have been several cases where the story provided by police officers has been refuted with video evidence.

Police officers’ bias in nonlethal force

Looking beyond lethal force, Fryer and his team found persistent racial bias at all other levels of force. Using the New York City Police Department’s data on its stop and frisk program between 2003 and 2013, the researchers found a notable relationship between race and the use of force. After controlling for as many variables as possible, the researchers note that black civilians are 17 percent more likely to be subject to the use of force than white civilians. For Hispanics, the rate was 12 percent higher than for white people.

Interestingly, this pattern largely remained consistent at a range of different levels. The lowest level of force measured–officers laying their hands on a subject–occurred much more frequently than the highest–using pepper spray or a baton. But the rate at which minority civilians incur the use of force largely remained consistent at all levels short of lethal force. As Fryer puts it, “The use of high levels of force in these data are rare. Yet, it is consistently rarer for whites relative to blacks.” What’s particularly interesting about this is that the researchers managed to find bias in data collected and provided by the NYPD itself.

The researchers also looked at a nationally representative survey to identify the extent to which racial bias exists in these interactions. Using data from the Police-Public Contact Survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they found even larger differences in the use of force by race. While the researchers note that the rate at which officers used force was considerably lower in the survey data–about 15 percent of white civilians experienced the use of force in the stop and frisk data while only 1 percent reported experiencing force in the survey data–a pattern of bias remains for different racial groups. They conclude:

Differences in quantitative magnitudes aside, the PPCS paints a similar portrait–large racial differences in police use of force that cannot be explained using a large and varied set of controls.

After looking over his research, Fryer argues that police may act according to perceived costs. He suggests that there may not be racial bias in the use of lethal force because doing so is particularly costly–there is often internal reviews and the decision to shoot someone can have profound life consequences for the police officer as well as the victim. However, the same costs may not exist when using nonlethal force. Fryer argues that if we wish to reduce racial bias for lower levels of force, we should increase the costs associated with using them. Put simply, if we want to reduce this bias, police need to feel that they will be held accountable for unnecessarily using force.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post When Does Racial Bias Affect Police Officers’ Use of Force? appeared first on Law Street.

University of Virginia student Martese Johnson filed a $3 million civil rights lawsuit against Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverages Control agents on Tuesday, alleging that they used excessive force during his bloody arrest in March.

Johnson is suing the VA ABC and three agents–Jared Miller, Thomas Custer, John Cielakie, and Shawn P. Walker–arguing that they used excessive force when he was arrested, and that he was unlawfully detained.

The junior honor student was arrested on March 18 after catching the attention of liquor agents after being denied entry by a bouncer outside of an Irish pub in Charlottesville. The agents asked to see Johnson’s “fake ID” and then wrestled him to the ground, causing several facial wounds to bleed profusely when his head struck the pavement.

Johnson was later charged with resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force, and profane swearing or intoxication in public. The charges were eventually dropped, and Johnson maintains that he was not intoxicated, acting belligerently, nor using a fake ID.

Videos and photos of Johnson, who is African-American, with blood streaming down his face calling the officers “racist” were widely distributed on social media sites, inciting outrage in his community and the rest of the country.

UVa’s Martese Johnson files $3 million suit against @VirginiaABC after bloody arrest https://t.co/k7PPFsqklC pic.twitter.com/tjV65t6L7k

— The Roanoke Times (@roanoketimes) October 20, 2015

In an emotional essay for Vanity Fair, Johnson recalled the night of his arrest writing,

When I was picked up and dragged away by these officers, glimpses of my ancestors’ history flashed before my eyes. Although it could never compare to a life of slavery, for those hours, I had no freedom, no autonomy, and no say in what was happening to me. I cried for a long time that night—not because of my physical wounds (though there were many) or possible jail time (I was charged with two misdemeanors that were eventually dropped), but because my lifelong vision of sanctuary in success was destroyed in seconds.

He later added,

The officers’ actions may not have been premeditated that night, but I do believe they were calculated.

[…]

Why would I be subjected to such violence when so many other students in similar circumstances—so many other students that same night—were left alone?

Now he’s making sure to fight back against the people who humiliated, scared, and hurt him, including the institution that trained them. He explains his reasoning for going after not just the ABC as a whole but also the investigators themselves writing,

ABC agents have a history of aggressive, excessive, and unjustified behavior in effectuating their duties. This history stems from and is caused by a systemic failure to train and supervise agents by Defendants ABC and Director Walker.

It’s clear that public support falls in favor of Johnson, but it will be up to a court to decide whether or not these agents and the ABC broke the law.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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