Tag: Salem

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Latino people in Salem are more likely to be cited by police after being stopped than white people, according to a new report from the state’s Criminal Justice Commission.

The report analyzes police stops for 153 law enforcement agencies across Oregon in the last two years.

It also showed Salem police stopped Black and Latino people at a higher rate than their share of Salem’s population, though the commission identified too many possible variables to conclude the difference was significant.

Since 2017, state law has required all law enforcement agencies to submit data on traffic and pedestrian stops annually to the Criminal Justice Commission to review for racial or ethnic disparities. The law also requires that officers record their perception of a person’s race or ethnicity who they stop. 

The commission describes the data as “one of most robust stop data collection efforts in the United States.”

The recent report looks at officer-initiated stops, where police have a choice about who they interact with, rather than incidents where police are responding to a call for service. 

The commission on Dec. 1 published its sixth annual STOP report. The acronym stands for the Statistical Transparency of Policing. 

All law enforcement agencies listed in the report showed racial or ethnic disparities in citation rates, though the disparity was wider among smaller agencies which make fewer stops, resulting in a smaller sample size and less precise statistical tests, according to the report.

READ: 2024 STOP Report

The recent report showed Latino people were cited by Salem police more often than the commission expected. 

The commission makes such predictions using a statistical technique that adjusts for factors like the time of day, reason for the stop, gender and age which could make someone more or less likely to be stopped by police.

If those factors were made equal, the commission would expect Latino people to be cited about 60% of the time they’re stopped in Salem, the report said. But police instead cited 63% of Latino people they stopped. The citation data included only rates and not actual numbers.

The report described that disparity as statistically significant, meaning it is unlikely to have occurred by random chance.

Salem Police Chief Trevor Womack said Thursday that he takes the STOP reports seriously. “Identifying and addressing disparate outcomes is a departmental priority,” he said in an email. “Each year, we contribute our data and pay close attention to the resulting STOP reports, and proactively share them online for full transparency.”

He said his agency did not show statistically significant disparities in two of the commission’s three analytical tests, which would require intervention by the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training.

The report offers one possible explanation for the disparity. Across Oregon, police were more likely to stop Latino drivers based on suspicion of offenses like driving recklessly or with a suspended license, where officers have less discretion on issuing citations.

Factoring the type of offense in, the report concluded the higher citation rate for Latinos in Salem was not statistically significant. The same was true for other law enforcement agencies in Oregon.

“This suggests that, systematically across police agencies in Oregon, low-discretion policies tend to increase perceptible racial disparities in citations for some groups,” the report said.

While the report’s citation data focused on the past two years, its data on stops was limited to one year.

Salem officers stopped 157 Black people between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024, around 4.3% of its stops. Salem’s population is 1.6% Black, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

The commission concluded such differences weren’t statistically significant, meaning it’s possible they occurred by random chance.

“Analyses contained in this report cannot be used either as absolute proof that a law enforcement agency engaged in racially biased conduct or as disproof of racially biased conduct,” the report says.

It also notes that because it only looks at data from agencies as a whole, it can’t identify incidents where an individual interaction with law enforcement may have included bias.

“As such, regardless of whether a department is reported to have an identified disparity or not, this report cannot and does not discount or speak to the personal experiences of individuals who have been subjected to biased treatment,” it says.

Another 1,090 Salem police stops, around 30%, involved Latino people. The city’s residents are 23% Latino.

But the drivers and pedestrians in Salem on any given day may not be representative of the city’s resident population. The disparity is small enough that other factors such as people traveling to and from Salem for work or events may be enough to account for the gap.

The report said 38% of police searches of Latino people resulted in finding contraband, slightly higher than 34% for white people. The commission does such analysis to detect any disparity in how often officers search people of different races and ethnicities compared with how often they find contraband.

Search data in the report was limited to white and Latino people because Salem police searched fewer than 30 members of other racial groups. 

The Salem Police Department stops the highest share of pedestrians of any law enforcement agency in Oregon, according to the report.

Of the people stopped by Salem officers in the year of data the state analyzed, 6.3% were on foot, compared with drivers. They also had the highest share of pedestrian stops the previous year with 4.6%.

Salem police spokeswoman Angela Hedrick said the agency could not immediately explain the high percentage of pedestrian stops. She said the department needs to have an analyst review the data and seek input from all of its divisions. 

The second-highest percentage of pedestrian stops this past year came from the Roseburg Police Department, with 5.7%.

This story was updated after Salem Police Chief Trevor Womack provided a written response to the report’s findings.

Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.

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Ardeshir Tabrizian has covered criminal justice and housing for Salem Reporter since September 2021. As an Oregon native, his award-winning watchdog journalism has traversed the state. He has done reporting for The Oregonian, Eugene Weekly and Malheur Enterprise.