Michigan State Police must attack institutional racism
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The Michigan State Police deserve credit for completing a one-year study into big differences between traffic stops for Black drivers and everyone else in the state — which was announced earlier this month. But the MSP response to its own report fails to take dead aim at the social menace that lurks behind the study’s findings. This plague is institutional racism, and it will keep hiding in plain sight until MSP and other state leaders call it out and confront it.
The MSP study, announced Jan. 12 after completion last fall by the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice, found that 22.1% of all traffic stops in 2020 involved Black drivers, who comprise only 13.6% of Michigan’s population. Furthermore, the study found that “African American drivers are significantly more likely than White drivers to be searched or arrested after traffic stops.”
Tell me something I don’t know. Black Michigan residents could offer a plethora of anecdotes about harrowing traffic stops, especially in remote areas of the state. While I applaud the MSP for initiating the study and for coming up with a five-point plan to address the traffic-stop issue, the state agency’s follow-up is only a series of half-measures. The Michigan State Police don’t need to puzzle over the disproportionately high rate of Black drivers who get stopped and arrested on Michigan roads. After winning or settling major lawsuits against the state police — including two recent class-action cases — I can tell you plainly that the traffic-stop study is just symptomatic of the institutional racism MSP needs to attack directly.
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In lawsuits involving police officers nationwide, as employees of various law enforcement agencies, people of color frequently notify the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that they’re not getting career-enhancing assignments, they’re not getting promoted, they’re disciplined more harshly for the same conduct as their white colleagues. They have to tolerate the use of vulgar racial epithets in the workplace. As legal counsel for the National Black State Troopers Coalition, I represent cases involve state troopers in Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana and Texas. Racial bias against officers of color that is tolerated within law enforcement agencies gets carried out onto the streets, often in the form of excessive traffic stops.
Certainly, the MSP’s five-point plan for addressing the racial disparity it found in its traffic stops study is a step forward. Equipping Michigan state troopers who deal with the public with bodycam equipment, hiring an independent expert to review MSP policies, a professional development bureau” within MSP for further bias training, making traffic-stop data available internally to officers, and a statewide “listening and engagement effort” in communities of color — all good. But I wonder: who will monitor the implementation and enforcement of these reforms?
MSP still shows little appetite for addressing the root problem. But maybe the plain truth is becoming more obvious. According to a Jan. 12 Free Press article, Scott Wolfe, a Michigan State associate professor who led analysis of the traffic stop data for the MSP, declared: “Discrimination involves intent, whereas observed disparities do not speak to whether an officer acted with intent.” Yet, Wolfe acknowledged this much: “At the same time, the data do show a meaningful level of disparity that deserves more attention.”
Yes, a lot more attention. Industrial psychologists can pinpoint discrimination in organizations and prove it, using statistical data. They can then recommend specific steps to eliminate racism in hiring, promotions and operations. But the organizational specialists must be selected and empowered to do their important work by a community-based oversight group like the NAACP or the ACLU, not the organization that needs to be overhauled. I contracted with an industrial psychological specialist who helped me put together a roadmap for rooting out institutional racism. The national Black state troopers group I represent actually sent that roadmap to the directors of every state police agency in the country, including the Michigan State Police. But most agency directors ignored it.
Until such fundamental changes are made within law enforcement agencies, no other policy changes will have much effect. In the meantime, police agencies need to immediately discipline officers who are caught in misconduct.
MSP’s five-point traffic study response is logical, practical and has all the appearance of movement in the right direction. But it dances around the people problem at MSP that won’t go away. The agency needs to directly attack its institutional racism and shut it down.
Leonard Mungo, owner of Mungo & Mungo at Law PLC, has represented black state troopers who successfully sued the Michigan State Police for job discrimination. He is also general counsel for the National Black State Troopers Coalition.
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