The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is requesting that police collect racial data when making traffic stops as an attempt to hold police officers accountable, safeguard drivers from racial discrimination and protect officers who are are innocent of these actions.
While this legislation would not completely solve a deeply rooted, systemic issue of racism in policing, the motivations behind it are well intentioned.
Data can be a good indicator of implicit bias. By having these parameters set in place, officers may put more thought behind their decisions, and transparency will be forced throughout Massachusetts’ police departments.
However, there will be many complications along the way to the kind of genuine change policing needs.
Many argue that instead of pushing for reform efforts such as this, we should completely abolish the police and create new ways of enforcing safety. Part of the reasoning behind this argument is that the policing system was founded on racism. Specifically in the American South, police forces were established to catch runaway slaves.
The racial biases that were in the system then are still there now. And collecting data on traffic stops might not be of too much assistance — more action will need to be taken. The Boston Police Reform Task Force’s proposals, for example, have some promising potential.
But even if the SJC’s requested legislation stops a police officer from racially profiling someone because they know their actions will be recorded, that won’t change their internal feelings — they can still hold racist sentiments and not take a serious assessment of their actions.
Even the measures that are currently set in place for documenting police actions are not reliable. Officers have been observed to turn body cameras off, and within the past several months, we have seen that one of the only concrete ways for heinous crimes to be revealed is through civilian recordings.
Although many such recordings have been viewed by millions worldwide, they haven’t succeeded in prompting true justice or change. If anything, police brutality has been increasing as peaceful protests turn turbulent and tensions only grow higher between police and the civilians who are fed up with their behavior.
The police and their misdeeds are on full blast. People everywhere are watching, reporting and demanding change.
Yet the police who continue to shoot and kill Black people at disproportionate rates do not seem to care that the whole world is watching. They do not seem to care that their body cameras should be on. They do not seem to care when they are taking the life of a human being — they know they won’t be held accountable.
Being required to record data won’t necessarily prevent continued discrimination. They could very well go along with their regular behavior because they have never faced repercussions, or simply because they forgot about the protocol and racial discrimination is a “force of habit.”
And if they already aren’t careful about the actions they take in public, what will stop them from inaccurately reporting their traffic stops?
For starters, it is too easy to manipulate this data. There is nothing on a driver’s license — besides a photo — to confirm the information that they are collecting, and someone could easily lie about their stops to make the data seem proportional. There needs to be clear guidelines on how the data will be collected accurately, and those procedures must be made public.
Moreover, simple collection of racial data isn’t a particularly productive way of combating racial profiling. There must be additional data on how the situation was handled and how the civilian was treated.
If an officer is patrolling a predominantly Black or Brown community, of course their data will be skewed compared to other areas. A positive result of this, however, is that police departments may begin to acknowledge that these minority communities are actually over-policed.
In general, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the reporting of racial data. A lot of people are still confused by the difference between race and ethnicity, and it is a common mix-up. Some people are racially ambiguous, too, and would be difficult to categorize under a single race.
As America has slowly drifted away from the era of segregation — when inter-racial relationships were illegal — it has become increasingly common for people to be of more than one race.
What does race mean when you’re mixed? “Mixed” is such a vague term within itself.
On many official documents, people are required to fill out their race or ethnicity — sometimes even down to the percentage. Is someone abusing the system by claiming to be Native American if that only makes up one-eighth of their genetics?
Keeping tabs on race is difficult, and how to use this data properly seems to always be a near-unsolvable quandary.
Colleges keep track of race for affirmative-action purposes. Checking off your race on a job application, however, may actually enable hiring discrimination.
When we disclose our race, there is no guarantee it won’t be used to harm us. But when we don’t, the systemic barriers that disproportionately hold some minorities back will not come to light.
So whether we account for race during a police stop or on an application, we must recognize why we feel we must do it in the first place: our country is still struggling with racism. Struggling may even be too kind a word.
