Common Ground on Racial Profiling

After an initial disagreement over an annual racial profiling report presented to the Manchester Board of Directors by the Manchester police chief, the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut and the town of Manchester established a consensus on the importance of better data on traffic stops and race to making any conclusions valid.

“We all agree that that the most important work in Connecticut in analyzing traffic stop data for signs of racial bias is just beginning,” said Sandra Staub, legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut. “With changes in state law that took effect on Oct. 1, we’re just starting to get more detailed and meaningful information about who is being pulled over, why they are stopped and the outcomes.”

Manchester Police Chief Marc Montminy welcomed the review and invited representatives of the ACLU of Connecticut and the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State University to a Jan. 7 meeting to discuss the department’s 2013 Report on Racial Profiling, released in December. The report concluded that data on traffic stops collected by Manchester police officers in 2012 did not show evidence of biased policing. The ACLU of Connecticut responded that the data was not sufficient for analysis, and could indicate the opposite.

The Jan. 7 meeting concluded with a consensus that the data, although collected in accordance with state law at the time and reported in good faith, could not determine whether racial profiling has occurred in Manchester, primarily because the data that the law required police departments to collect before Oct. 1, 2013 was not sufficient for proper analysis.

Ken Barone, a researcher for the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, explained that the more complete data now being collected will provide much better material for analysis. James Fazzalaro, manager of the institute’s Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, said the staff is working on benchmarks for comparison, reflecting not the demographics of each town’s population but the demographics of the people who drive in them.

"It is encouraging to see the ACLU and Manchester Police Department, who seemed to be on different sides of this issue, able to discuss the information in a positive and productive way,” Fazzalaro said after the meeting. The conversation helped to reinforce many of the changes made to the Alvin W. Penn Act to enhance Connecticut's efforts in addressing racial profiling."The institute is working with the Racial Profiling Prohibition Advisory Board, of which Staub is a member, to design the data collection process and manage the analysis of data collected throughout the state.

“Few departments collected traffic stop data consistently before Oct. 1, and we respect the Manchester Police Department for its diligence and for trying to make sense of the data,” Staub said. “We also commend Chief Montminy for opening a dialogue with us on this issue, which he clearly takes seriously.”

In addition to Montminy, Staub, Barone and Fazzalaro, the meeting was attended by Scott Shanley, Manchester town manager; David McGuire, ACLU of Connecticut staff attorney; and Jeanne Leblanc, ACLU of Connecticut communications and education manager.