Eighteen percent of the people arrested by Portland police last year were minorities, who comprise only 7 percent of the city’s population, but that does not mean officers are targeting people of color, the city’s police chief says.
Chief Michael Sauschuck presented the department’s statistics at a forum hosted by the NAACP Portland branch, Green Memorial AME Zion Church and Williams Temple Church of God in Christ. The meeting, and an earlier one in August, were prompted by events in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black man on Aug. 9, triggering sometimes violent protests that have focused attention on relations between officers and the communities they police.
Monday night’s forum at the Portland Public Library, attended by about 50 residents, was an opportunity for Sauschuck to respond to questions raised at the August meeting, including how frequently minorities are arrested in Portland, how the department is recruiting minority hires, and steps the department takes to build relationships with different communities.
Sauschuck said that only looking at the percentage of people arrested who are black compared to the city’s demographics – 7 percent of its population is black, according to the 2010 Census – could be overly simplistic.
“Some folks say that means we are targeting blacks over whites,” he said Tuesday, using the terms used by the FBI and U.S. Census in its data collection and reporting. “I don’t believe that’s the case. I don’t believe there’s a pervasive issue with racial profiling in the city of Portland.”
That 18 percent does represent disproportionate contact between minorities and law enforcement, but there are other factors, Sauschuck said. For instance, of the 3,511 people arrested in 2013, roughly 42 percent lived outside the city, many outside Maine. He did not have a breakdown of the race of Portland residents who were arrested.
The numbers also reflect arrests, not individuals. He noted that while 13 arrests last year involved Native Americans, representing 0.3 percent of the total, seven of them were of just one person.
Sauschuck said none of the department’s policing strategies are race-based and maintained that it does not have a pervasive problem with racial profiling.
“Has it happened? I’m sure it has. I think it happens in all communities,” he said. “That’s why we hire the best possible people to start with and put them through rigorous training programs and update them as often as possible on all these various topics.”
He said complaints about officer conduct are thoroughly investigated by internal affairs, and that team’s work is then reviewed by a citizen committee.
A call to the NAACP’s Portland branch was not returned Tuesday.
The people with whom officers come into contact are often those who are living below the poverty line and have not benefited from existing social support systems, Sauschuck said.
“Disproportionate minority contact speaks to failings in the economic system, the education system and societal culture as a whole and (police) are dealing with symptoms of a much broader societal problem,” he said.
National data compiled by the FBI shows that of the 9.4 million arrests in 2012 nationwide, 69 percent were white and 28 percent were black. For the population as a whole, white people represent 72.4 percent and black people 12.6 percent.
The FBI cautions against comparing arrest rates in different communities because of the multitude of influencing factors, such as the number of young people, education levels and citizen attitudes about crime and their willingness to report incidents.
In Monday’s forum, Sauschuck also addressed the relatively small number of black officers in the department. Five percent of the department’s 163 officers are people of color, compared to a population that is 15 percent non-white. The department has just three black officers.
Sauschuck said the department struggles, like many others across the country, to attract minority candidates, and hires less than 3 percent of the people who apply for jobs as police officers, reflecting its rigorous screening process. With just 7 percent of the city’s 66,000 population identified as black, many of them recent immigrants, it’s a small pool to draw from. “That makes it very difficult to have our department mirror our community,” Sauschuck said. “Certainly that’s a goal.”
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