Columbia's city manager and police chief will meet with members of the community to discuss a report from the Missouri Attorney General that shows black motorists are three times more likely to be pulled over in the city than white drivers and more likely to be searched.
The city leaders announced the plan for meetings, which have not been scheduled, in a news release Thursday morning. The disparity rate, as the measure is called in the attorney general's report, and police use of force rates that might indicate racial profiling have caused confusion among law enforcement and residents, the release said.
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City Manager Mike Matthes decided to have the community meetings after hearing concerns from residents and city council members about the disparity report and the perception of racial profiling by Columbia police, city spokesman Steve Sapp said. Matthes was not available for comment Thursday.
Sapp said Matthes approached Burton about opening a dialogue with local groups, noting Burton agreed to participate. Burton repeatedly has said the attorney general's data are incomplete and denied that racial profiling exists in Columbia, including at a recent press conference during which he was flanked by black leaders saying the opposite. Burton has not provided details about why he thinks the data are incomplete.
"Certainly we hope it's not, and we don't believe on the surface it is" a problem in Columbia, Sapp said. "We need to talk about it, open the doors to the police department's data and" figure out the truth.
City leaders have started to reach out to numerous groups to ask whether they will participate, including the NAACP, the Legion of Black Collegians, the Minority Men's Network and Race Matters, Friends. Sapp said the meetings hopefully will help determine whether racial profiling happens locally and what might be done to stop it.
Mary Ratliff, the president of the Columbia Chapter of the NAACP, said the meeting is long overdue.
"There's no question that racial profiling exists," Ratliff said. "We need to talk about what things cause this, what we can do to eliminate this, not just in Columbia but across the state."
The attorney general has collected and published the data annually since 2000. The reports have shown different disparity rates over the years locally, though Ratliff said nothing definitive has happened to change anything.
"It's not going to take just one meeting," she said. "It's not going to take just one group. It's going to take the community."
The city looked at what Urbana, Ill., did after it faced complaints of racial profiling, Sapp said.
A deeper look at the data, including the circumstances surrounding traffic stops — such as someone not being able to afford to fix a broken taillight — needs to be conducted, he said. The biggest takeaway from Urbana, Sapp said, was that it takes a community conversation to figure out the problem and solutions.
"It's not something we want to sit on for a length of time," Sapp said, adding the meetings will be scheduled in the near future. "We want to start getting input on what they see as the best way to move forward."
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Source: City leaders plan meetings to discuss racial profiling
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