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San Jose, the Sacrificial Guinea Pig of Law Enforcement Research
How A Newly Formed Academic Consortium Contracted With the City of San Jose May Prove More Hindrance Than Help in Building Back Community and Police Trust
In August of this year, the Consortium for Police Leadership and Equity (CPLE), a new national academic research group, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the City of San Jose. The mission of the CPLE was to “conduct research intended to better inform the San Jose Police Department and the City of San Jose with respect to ways in which SJPD might ensure the equitable delivery of police services.” Such an endeavor might have been lauded by community leaders and deemed as a perceptive preventative measure, if introduced in 2007. That was the time before San Jose, through a series of high profile cases involving suspected police misconduct and numerous forums where residents recounted their own experiences with police abuse, had arrived us to a moment of crisis with regards to police and community relations. Now approaching the end of 2009, we as a city are further down the road regarding this issue, having collectively acknowledged a problem exists, and are anxious to find and implement solutions. Indeed, at the very same November 19th San Jose Public Safety, Finance & Strategic Support Committee meeting the CPLE presented its first quarterly report, the Mayor’s office, in a 180 degree turn from previous positions on police records, recommended an unprecedented independent review of SJPD use of force reports. We are all ready to move forward.
Having come in so late in the process though, the CPLE resembles more the scientists who fly in after the tsunami has already struck. What they learn here may be useful for other cities looking to fortify against such disaster, but locally serve only as a distraction and even an impediment to the residents whose lives have been washed away and are anxious to build anew. Indeed, the CPLE is here for the sake of cities other than San Jose, which would be fine if they weren’t impeding our local healing process by being used as a research arm for those in law enforcement intent on denying a problem exists, while doing it.
Experimenting on San Jose Communities
The value of engaging with San Jose for the CPLE is evident. As a new consortium that was founded only this year, it needs cities to work in to build its organizational portfolio, but even more importantly, to develop its sense of know-how. The CPLE is a new model that is founded upon a unique relationship – law enforcement practitioners and social science researchers. The purported aim of the CPLE, “was simple–to foster collaborative relationships between two worlds–law enforcement and researchers.” As such, it is not only that the consortium that is new, but the field of study itself and the relationship it is based upon that is unexplored. San Jose is then, by proxy, an experiment -- a place to test, invent, and calibrate new research tools and methodologies.
And while being a guinea pig for social scientists is not inherently dangerous, given the volatile political landscape of San Jose with regards to police matters at this time, the presence of the CPLE has proven to polarize sides and derail us from the most urgent civic duty of the day – finding common ground to build back trust between the community and the police.
In the short time they have been here, the CPLE has already exacerbated the problem they espoused to help eliminate and have been used as a shield to fend off concerns of police misconduct. Indeed, the Police Officers Association, in their website called protectsanjose.com, is already repeatedly referencing the CPLE to parrot their own positions. They are currently producing a series of blogs which amplify the CPLE findings as scientific evidence to support their claim that there are no issues with the San Jose Police Department. While acknowledging the findings were preliminary, they write, “But we found it interesting that the CPLE’s findings echoed the themes of many recent articles on Protect San Jose, and contradicted previous reporting by the Mercury News.”
To some degree, it is not the fault of the CPLE. The responsibility was on the city leadership to be astute enough to know the implications of bringing in a new and fairly untested research group at an unusually sensitive time without any community feedback. Their failure to do so has proven to be problematic since its introduction and has been so ever since.
When the CPLE project in San Jose was announced in early 2009, it was perceived by many, whether accurately or not, as an instrument to undermine a council assembled taskforce that was looking at the issue of concern in policing practices. Several leading advocacy organizations publicly denounced the project, sending a letter to the Mayor and Council indicating so, and collectively agreed not to engage with the CPLE out of respect to the value of community buy in. The firestorm of controversy that this relationship was born from should have been an obvious indicator that the project was inappropriate, if only due to the debacle of its origins.
Observing the Observer
In physics there is what is called the “observer effect” – a term referring to changes that the act of observation can make on the phenomenon being observed. They use an example of someone swinging a broom in a dark room with the purpose of finding the location of a basketball. With a sweeping stroke, the researcher connects with the ball, finding its location; yet by hitting it, it sends it to a new place. The example is to make the ultimate point that even the mere examination can have consequence, particularly if done without delicacy. The CPLE, having been brought in with tremendous controversy due to their utter lack of community buy-in or invitation, is a big, wildly swinging, broomstick. The consortium’s leading researcher, Dr. Phillip Goff, even reported that over 50% of those he interviewed in San Jose started by sharing their misgivings with the CPLE. And those are the ones who actually are speaking with them, hardly the healthy starting point to an independent study. How the CPLE arrived to San Jose, how they have been used by the POA and the SPJD to keep the city from addressing a pressing issue, eliminates the possibility that they can be an outside clinical examiner. They are now as much of a character in this story as the police union, advocacy organizations, or the city council. Maybe San Jose can hire another research group to study the CPLE’s impact on their own study?
And already, as one could have predicted, that CPLE broomstick is being wielded by law enforcement to attack claims of police misconduct. Indeed, in the report generated by the SJPD for the September 10 th PSFSS meeting where they were asked to do an assessment of their resisting arrest rates, the SJPD used CPLE remarks to frame the issue in a way that would discourage criticism or deeper investigation. In referring to community concerns around publication intoxication and resisting arrest disparities, they quoted Dr. Goff with underlined text as stating, “Looking only at those statistics as if they are telling you a complete picture is actually biasing you in favor of conversations that are going to be relatively contentious and unpleasant.” With the frequency they refer to Dr. Goff throughout the report, one would assume he was a SJPD researcher. It was not Dr. Goff’s point that is suspect, but rather that the CPLE willingly allowed itself to be used by the police department to diffuse long-standing community concerns, while still trying to be perceived as a neutral and disentangled from the local political debate.
In the CPLE’s latest address to the PSFSS committee on November 19th, Dr. Goff warned, “There is a difference between science and politics,” and that the two must be independent of one another to conduct an unadulterated research process. While such a firewall seems reasonable, Goff blended the two fields just as he was professing the sanctity of each. He reported to the committee that his preliminary findings show that, “on the surface of it, there doesn't seem to be a pattern of bias" by the police. Directly after his report, he stepped out of the meeting to do a round of media interviews, answering questions and reiterating his conclusions. His position was on television, radio, online, and in print almost immediately, supplemented by reactions by the Mayor, and top police executive staff. If the research is to be protected, why put out findings that are admittedly preliminary to begin with, thus allowing a scientific study to be used for a political end midway through the process? To not be aware of the impact of such a statement in the current political climate, and to voluntarily infuse the research into the political discourse, at worst exposes a research study being used purposely to undermine a broad-based community concern, or at best an irresponsible way of a research body directly impacting the results of their study. The CPLE must have known that their work, particularly controversial conclusions such as what they released this November, would be used as fodder for more divisive ends.
CPLE: The San Jose Police Echo Chamber
Goff’s main contention, the one that echoed through the media, is that the similarity of arrest data among discretionary versus non-discretionary rates equates to no bias in arresting practice. To begin with, the distinction between discretionary versus non-discretionary is not a universally accepted difference, and Goff admits that there is even debate within the law enforcement community as to whether such a separation can be made. He went on to tell PSFSS members that if the public knew that Latinos were being arrested at a higher rate than their general population for more serious crimes like assault, no one would have been “up in arms.” It is a leap in assumption that seems unusual for a scientist to make, and one I would disagree with. To say a problem exists in more places than where it was originally revealed does not mean the problem never existed in the first place. It may just mean it was more widespread. The questions that have surfaced around the validity of arrests of people of color is not a charge-specific concern. To say the problem of disparity exists beyond charges such as “public intoxication” and “resisting arrest” should not lead to a sigh of relief, but rather a cause of more concern, particularly if those charges may accompany use of force practices by police and harsher sentencing schemes by prosecutors. Plus, the public outrage over the past year has not been that Latinos are being disproportionately arrest for one charge versus another, but that people are of color are being arrested disproportionately to their general population.
And perhaps to offset the public condemnation by leading advocacy organizations, Goff told the committee that their study had an “over-representation of activists” meaning a higher rate in the study than the general population. As far as I know, “activist” is not a box on the census, and so how someone can make a determination of the number of activists in a city is beyond me. But even more poignant is that the current community activity for police accountability is not a movement of self-described activists – it is everyday community members who feel compelled to act. It is a movement whose moral center is found amongst mothers, fathers, and residents who otherwise were not engaging in the political process. By studying San Jose in a cookie-cutter framework – same characters, same issues – the CPLE shows a lack of understanding of San Jose’s local cultural and political environment.
“Perception is Reality”
Dr. Goff said that their findings were based on interviews with “over” 30 people. It was from these 30 plus people (in a city of a million) that he identified what the problem areas were. So when he may report that a majority of respondents took on a particular position that will dictate the direction of the CPLE study – he can be talking about 16 people. The Police Officers Association again, latched onto Dr. Goff’s analysis despite the limited interviews. In their latest blog, they quote Dr. Goff’s report, stating, “When asked, a majority of Black and Hispanic respondents do not believe that racism pervades the police department.” While such a study may be informative to the greater calculus as to how the community feels in regards to race, the sample size is so small, the number of Black or Latino respondents Goff is referring to could literally be under a dozen people. While any study must start from somewhere, how any scientist can feel confident enough to report findings based on such a incredibly small sample size seems astonishing.
Out in the hallway, when asked by a reporter why then was there such public outrage around policing practice if there was no evidence of bias, Goff responded, “Perception is reality.” It is a polite way of discounting the hundreds of San Jose residents who shared their perspective based on personal experience, and one that completely negates the year and a half saga that has been evolving since the Mercury News investigation on public intoxication in October of 2008. If Goff said such a statement back at that time, before the residents of San Jose shared their lives at City Council meetings and forum, it would have sounded like fair warning from a social scientist who knows statistics do not tell the whole story. Yet now, after the chorus of personal stories, such a statement is an insult to the intelligence of the San Jose public – insinuating that ethnic communities, in our gullibility and inability to discern reality from sensationalism, have been led like sheep by the media.
Fast forwarding down the road, either conclusion by the CPLE, whether they find bias or no bias, it is unclear how city leadership can see any added value for San Jose -- outside of the appearing as an innovative partner to a relatively new field of social sciences. If the final conclusion of the CPLE is that there is in fact no issues within the police department, what then? Will ethnic communities who repeatedly shared personal testimonies at City Council meetings, held rallies and forums, invested time into a taskforce process, watched alongside the rest of the world videos of San Jose police beatings on Youtube and mourned the loss of a young Vietnamese man, then apologize for their unscientific assumptions, misinterpretations of personal experiences, and go away? Hardly. And also, if the CPLE says that indeed there is racial bias being exhibited within police practices, what then? Will that change the trajectory that the community is already on of demanding accountability and a better relationship with police? No.
The truth is, the CLPE likely knows their limitations in terms of being of any assistance to San Jose and are more interested in the value their research might have in the national dialogue regarding law enforcement and ethnic communities. After the PSFSS meeting, Dr. Goff said he understood the local concerns when asked, and also acknowledged he saw a problem of how they were brought in to San Jose. But he also thinks the research will help other cities in furthering the national work around law enforcement policies. And the CPLE is already doing very interesting work -- projects in other cities that can ultimately be very helpful to San Jose such as a study on Taser guns in Houston, or the impact of state legislation that allows local police to enforce federal immigration laws in Salt Lake City. The best way the CPLE could use their $344,000 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation would be to invest in those projects, and share with us the findings.
In most cases, I would be all for San Jose being used as a city to inform other communities about issues involving law enforcement and ethnic communities, but their should be some acknowledgement as to that being the purpose of our city being studied. Let our San Jose residents decide if our need to move forward around police and community relations should be put on hold, or sacrificed, for this national dialogue.
Having come in so late in the process though, the CPLE resembles more the scientists who fly in after the tsunami has already struck. What they learn here may be useful for other cities looking to fortify against such disaster, but locally serve only as a distraction and even an impediment to the residents whose lives have been washed away and are anxious to build anew. Indeed, the CPLE is here for the sake of cities other than San Jose, which would be fine if they weren’t impeding our local healing process by being used as a research arm for those in law enforcement intent on denying a problem exists, while doing it.
Experimenting on San Jose Communities
The value of engaging with San Jose for the CPLE is evident. As a new consortium that was founded only this year, it needs cities to work in to build its organizational portfolio, but even more importantly, to develop its sense of know-how. The CPLE is a new model that is founded upon a unique relationship – law enforcement practitioners and social science researchers. The purported aim of the CPLE, “was simple–to foster collaborative relationships between two worlds–law enforcement and researchers.” As such, it is not only that the consortium that is new, but the field of study itself and the relationship it is based upon that is unexplored. San Jose is then, by proxy, an experiment -- a place to test, invent, and calibrate new research tools and methodologies.
And while being a guinea pig for social scientists is not inherently dangerous, given the volatile political landscape of San Jose with regards to police matters at this time, the presence of the CPLE has proven to polarize sides and derail us from the most urgent civic duty of the day – finding common ground to build back trust between the community and the police.
In the short time they have been here, the CPLE has already exacerbated the problem they espoused to help eliminate and have been used as a shield to fend off concerns of police misconduct. Indeed, the Police Officers Association, in their website called protectsanjose.com, is already repeatedly referencing the CPLE to parrot their own positions. They are currently producing a series of blogs which amplify the CPLE findings as scientific evidence to support their claim that there are no issues with the San Jose Police Department. While acknowledging the findings were preliminary, they write, “But we found it interesting that the CPLE’s findings echoed the themes of many recent articles on Protect San Jose, and contradicted previous reporting by the Mercury News.”
To some degree, it is not the fault of the CPLE. The responsibility was on the city leadership to be astute enough to know the implications of bringing in a new and fairly untested research group at an unusually sensitive time without any community feedback. Their failure to do so has proven to be problematic since its introduction and has been so ever since.
When the CPLE project in San Jose was announced in early 2009, it was perceived by many, whether accurately or not, as an instrument to undermine a council assembled taskforce that was looking at the issue of concern in policing practices. Several leading advocacy organizations publicly denounced the project, sending a letter to the Mayor and Council indicating so, and collectively agreed not to engage with the CPLE out of respect to the value of community buy in. The firestorm of controversy that this relationship was born from should have been an obvious indicator that the project was inappropriate, if only due to the debacle of its origins.
Observing the Observer
In physics there is what is called the “observer effect” – a term referring to changes that the act of observation can make on the phenomenon being observed. They use an example of someone swinging a broom in a dark room with the purpose of finding the location of a basketball. With a sweeping stroke, the researcher connects with the ball, finding its location; yet by hitting it, it sends it to a new place. The example is to make the ultimate point that even the mere examination can have consequence, particularly if done without delicacy. The CPLE, having been brought in with tremendous controversy due to their utter lack of community buy-in or invitation, is a big, wildly swinging, broomstick. The consortium’s leading researcher, Dr. Phillip Goff, even reported that over 50% of those he interviewed in San Jose started by sharing their misgivings with the CPLE. And those are the ones who actually are speaking with them, hardly the healthy starting point to an independent study. How the CPLE arrived to San Jose, how they have been used by the POA and the SPJD to keep the city from addressing a pressing issue, eliminates the possibility that they can be an outside clinical examiner. They are now as much of a character in this story as the police union, advocacy organizations, or the city council. Maybe San Jose can hire another research group to study the CPLE’s impact on their own study?
And already, as one could have predicted, that CPLE broomstick is being wielded by law enforcement to attack claims of police misconduct. Indeed, in the report generated by the SJPD for the September 10 th PSFSS meeting where they were asked to do an assessment of their resisting arrest rates, the SJPD used CPLE remarks to frame the issue in a way that would discourage criticism or deeper investigation. In referring to community concerns around publication intoxication and resisting arrest disparities, they quoted Dr. Goff with underlined text as stating, “Looking only at those statistics as if they are telling you a complete picture is actually biasing you in favor of conversations that are going to be relatively contentious and unpleasant.” With the frequency they refer to Dr. Goff throughout the report, one would assume he was a SJPD researcher. It was not Dr. Goff’s point that is suspect, but rather that the CPLE willingly allowed itself to be used by the police department to diffuse long-standing community concerns, while still trying to be perceived as a neutral and disentangled from the local political debate.
In the CPLE’s latest address to the PSFSS committee on November 19th, Dr. Goff warned, “There is a difference between science and politics,” and that the two must be independent of one another to conduct an unadulterated research process. While such a firewall seems reasonable, Goff blended the two fields just as he was professing the sanctity of each. He reported to the committee that his preliminary findings show that, “on the surface of it, there doesn't seem to be a pattern of bias" by the police. Directly after his report, he stepped out of the meeting to do a round of media interviews, answering questions and reiterating his conclusions. His position was on television, radio, online, and in print almost immediately, supplemented by reactions by the Mayor, and top police executive staff. If the research is to be protected, why put out findings that are admittedly preliminary to begin with, thus allowing a scientific study to be used for a political end midway through the process? To not be aware of the impact of such a statement in the current political climate, and to voluntarily infuse the research into the political discourse, at worst exposes a research study being used purposely to undermine a broad-based community concern, or at best an irresponsible way of a research body directly impacting the results of their study. The CPLE must have known that their work, particularly controversial conclusions such as what they released this November, would be used as fodder for more divisive ends.
CPLE: The San Jose Police Echo Chamber
Goff’s main contention, the one that echoed through the media, is that the similarity of arrest data among discretionary versus non-discretionary rates equates to no bias in arresting practice. To begin with, the distinction between discretionary versus non-discretionary is not a universally accepted difference, and Goff admits that there is even debate within the law enforcement community as to whether such a separation can be made. He went on to tell PSFSS members that if the public knew that Latinos were being arrested at a higher rate than their general population for more serious crimes like assault, no one would have been “up in arms.” It is a leap in assumption that seems unusual for a scientist to make, and one I would disagree with. To say a problem exists in more places than where it was originally revealed does not mean the problem never existed in the first place. It may just mean it was more widespread. The questions that have surfaced around the validity of arrests of people of color is not a charge-specific concern. To say the problem of disparity exists beyond charges such as “public intoxication” and “resisting arrest” should not lead to a sigh of relief, but rather a cause of more concern, particularly if those charges may accompany use of force practices by police and harsher sentencing schemes by prosecutors. Plus, the public outrage over the past year has not been that Latinos are being disproportionately arrest for one charge versus another, but that people are of color are being arrested disproportionately to their general population.
And perhaps to offset the public condemnation by leading advocacy organizations, Goff told the committee that their study had an “over-representation of activists” meaning a higher rate in the study than the general population. As far as I know, “activist” is not a box on the census, and so how someone can make a determination of the number of activists in a city is beyond me. But even more poignant is that the current community activity for police accountability is not a movement of self-described activists – it is everyday community members who feel compelled to act. It is a movement whose moral center is found amongst mothers, fathers, and residents who otherwise were not engaging in the political process. By studying San Jose in a cookie-cutter framework – same characters, same issues – the CPLE shows a lack of understanding of San Jose’s local cultural and political environment.
“Perception is Reality”
Dr. Goff said that their findings were based on interviews with “over” 30 people. It was from these 30 plus people (in a city of a million) that he identified what the problem areas were. So when he may report that a majority of respondents took on a particular position that will dictate the direction of the CPLE study – he can be talking about 16 people. The Police Officers Association again, latched onto Dr. Goff’s analysis despite the limited interviews. In their latest blog, they quote Dr. Goff’s report, stating, “When asked, a majority of Black and Hispanic respondents do not believe that racism pervades the police department.” While such a study may be informative to the greater calculus as to how the community feels in regards to race, the sample size is so small, the number of Black or Latino respondents Goff is referring to could literally be under a dozen people. While any study must start from somewhere, how any scientist can feel confident enough to report findings based on such a incredibly small sample size seems astonishing.
Out in the hallway, when asked by a reporter why then was there such public outrage around policing practice if there was no evidence of bias, Goff responded, “Perception is reality.” It is a polite way of discounting the hundreds of San Jose residents who shared their perspective based on personal experience, and one that completely negates the year and a half saga that has been evolving since the Mercury News investigation on public intoxication in October of 2008. If Goff said such a statement back at that time, before the residents of San Jose shared their lives at City Council meetings and forum, it would have sounded like fair warning from a social scientist who knows statistics do not tell the whole story. Yet now, after the chorus of personal stories, such a statement is an insult to the intelligence of the San Jose public – insinuating that ethnic communities, in our gullibility and inability to discern reality from sensationalism, have been led like sheep by the media.
Fast forwarding down the road, either conclusion by the CPLE, whether they find bias or no bias, it is unclear how city leadership can see any added value for San Jose -- outside of the appearing as an innovative partner to a relatively new field of social sciences. If the final conclusion of the CPLE is that there is in fact no issues within the police department, what then? Will ethnic communities who repeatedly shared personal testimonies at City Council meetings, held rallies and forums, invested time into a taskforce process, watched alongside the rest of the world videos of San Jose police beatings on Youtube and mourned the loss of a young Vietnamese man, then apologize for their unscientific assumptions, misinterpretations of personal experiences, and go away? Hardly. And also, if the CPLE says that indeed there is racial bias being exhibited within police practices, what then? Will that change the trajectory that the community is already on of demanding accountability and a better relationship with police? No.
The truth is, the CLPE likely knows their limitations in terms of being of any assistance to San Jose and are more interested in the value their research might have in the national dialogue regarding law enforcement and ethnic communities. After the PSFSS meeting, Dr. Goff said he understood the local concerns when asked, and also acknowledged he saw a problem of how they were brought in to San Jose. But he also thinks the research will help other cities in furthering the national work around law enforcement policies. And the CPLE is already doing very interesting work -- projects in other cities that can ultimately be very helpful to San Jose such as a study on Taser guns in Houston, or the impact of state legislation that allows local police to enforce federal immigration laws in Salt Lake City. The best way the CPLE could use their $344,000 grant from the Russell Sage Foundation would be to invest in those projects, and share with us the findings.
In most cases, I would be all for San Jose being used as a city to inform other communities about issues involving law enforcement and ethnic communities, but their should be some acknowledgement as to that being the purpose of our city being studied. Let our San Jose residents decide if our need to move forward around police and community relations should be put on hold, or sacrificed, for this national dialogue.
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