In response to complaints that the police had run the first three meetings, the fourth -- held on a wintry night in early December -- had no fewer than three facilitators, including Denver City Councilwoman Elbra Wedgeworth, Whittier Neighborhood Association president Darrell Watson and Metro State College criminologist Angelina De La Torre. With police on one side, many unidentified community leaders on the other and confused residents in the middle, the meeting ended in an incoherent standoff.
At the fifth meeting, held January 10 on Denver's northwest side, discussion again focused mostly on rules and procedures for future meetings. "We're having a meeting about how to have a meeting we're not going to have," Pate pointed out.
Hadley Hooper
Brett Amole
Jhenita Whitfield and her sister were stopped for Driving While Black in Eagle County.
Related Content
More About
Nevertheless, community leaders and police officials praised the process as the meeting wrapped up. "Tonight I think we saw officers who want to do the right thing," Gonzales said.
"As long as we can keep coming back to the table, we can make progress," Captain Vasquez added. The next meeting is set for January 30 at Clybourn Village.
But critics of the process say real progress won't come until the police admit that profiling exists. "They may be in denial," says Gonzales, who frequently steps out from her neutral "facilitator" role.
Christine Romano, who works as a liaison between police and north Denver residents along Colfax between Colorado and Yosemite, says only two people have come to her with complaints about profiling over the past five years. And once her office investigated, the complainants realized they weren't victims of profiling, merely rude behavior. "We're mandating our Denver police officers prove that they are innocent rather than guilty," Romano adds. "We're profiling our Denver officers."
The city's Public Safety Review Commission, which handles police complaints, won't say whether any of those complaints concern profiling. The DPD's Internal Affairs Division doesn't keep track of profiling issues, although it may when the department begins collecting data on stops this summer.
But collecting that data has its own problems. Asking motorists what their ethnic background is may be seen as harassment itself. And the methodology could create more obstacles. Rather than straight data collection, James Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, recommends an experimental study that would send black and white motorists with identical characteristics (age, car, gender, so forth) into particular areas in order to determine whether one group is stopped more frequently. The city, however, is going with the straightforward collection system.
Romano has another concern. Since officers are supposedly already trained not to see color, she wonders whether data collection sends a contradictory message: "'We're going to force you to see color. If you see too much color, you'd better watch out.' Is that what we're saying?"
"It's really preposterous for them to think profiling doesn't exist," responds De La Torre. "If it's everywhere else in the country, what are the odds that it is not here?"
Ask Jhenita Whitfield.
