At a time when the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., has brought tensions between police and minority communities to the forefront, Rocky Mountain PBS I-News has found that racial disparities persist in shootings in Denver.
Seven of the 33 people shot by Denver police and sheriff’s deputies in the past five years were African American, according to data collected by the Office of the Independent Monitor, a city watchdog. That’s 21 percent of shootings, compared with a black population of 9.7 percent during roughly the same period, according to Census data.
Thirteen of those shot between 2009 and 2013 were Hispanic; 12 were white. That means about 39 percent involved Latinos, 32 percent of the population. Thirty-six percent involved whites – 52 percent of the population.
The data include all shootings, not just fatalities.
Matthew Murray, chief of staff for the Denver police, said that inferring meaning from the numbers is “dangerous.
“The number of variables in this societal question are so huge,” he said.
But Denise Maes, of the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the data points to inequality in the treatment of minorities.
“While we like to think of ourselves as living in the post-racial world, these numbers clearly bear out something completely different,” she said.
“We know that African Americans and Latinos are stopped more often, arrested more often by police and get harsher sentences,” she said.
Nationwide, research on the use of force has consistently found significant disparities. New York-based ProPublica reported, based on FBI data, that young black males were 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than young whites.
Denver isn’t immune to claims of racial profiling.
It has been more than 11 years since the shooting death in his home of Paul Childs, a developmentally disabled 15-year-old, galvanized anger in African-American anger about excessive force The July 2003 death led to changes in the training of Denver officers to improve sensitivity in responding to crises. The city paid the Childs family $1.3 million in the case.
Since then, a steady stream of injuries and deaths of minorities at the hands of law enforcement has kept alive the perception in some communities of bias: The July 2004 death of 64-year-old Hispanic Frank Lobato, who was unarmed and in his bed when he was shot; the 2009 beating of 19-year-old African-American college student Alex Landau, who was pulled over for failing to signal; and the 2010 death of Marvin Booker, a homeless African-American preacher who was shocked with a Taser and put into a sleeper hold at the Denver jail.
In October, the Booker family was awarded $4.7 million by a federal jury.
The August shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., by white officer Darren Wilson exposed raw nerves and triggered weeks of protests. In an announcement Monday night, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch announced that a county grand jury would not indict Wilson.
Brown’s family expressed disappointment.
Some of the issues at play in Ferguson, which is majority black but where the leadership is primarily white, don’t have a parallel in Denver, with its African-American mayor, police chief and sheriff.
A study published in 2007 and co-authored by Tracie Keesee, then a Denver police commander, examined officers’ reactions to a video simulation of confrontations with armed and unarmed people, black and white. The study found that Denver police shot at unarmed targets at roughly equal rates regardless of race. It was interpreted as an indication that officers could be trained to be less trigger-prone.
Nonetheless, Rev. Leon Kelly, a Denver anti-gang activist, said that for now, the numbers aren’t surprising.
“I always tell my guys and girls, we are not playing on a level playing field,” said Kelly. “So don’t play the game.”