Nathan Cindrich

The Question

For years, the story has been the same. Its plot involves unnecessary stops, disproportionate responses, and inexcusable use-of-force. People of color in Cleveland, and cities like it across the country, have become intimately familiar with this narrative. Police enforce the law in different ways depending on who they are policing. And how does this story usually end? With silence from city officials, or maybe a settlement with no admission of wrongdoing. In response to persistent attempts to discredit their experiences, activists and leaders in the black community have pushed for new tools to change how people in power hear their stories. A Similar Story Where Police Collect Data Recently, the court-appointed monitor released a first-year plan for implementing the agreement between the City of Cleveland and the U.S. Justice Department to reform police practices. Several major points in the plan deal with the use of force by officers, and how these incidents are reported. This reporting has the ability to take a disturbingly common story of police misconduct and package it in a way that skeptics cannot ignore. In places where better data collection policies have been implemented, a similar story about inequities in law enforcement emerges. In Florida, a 2005 law began requiring police departments to report the race of people who received seat belt tickets. These numbers revealed massive racial disparities—black people are ticketed for not wearing seat belts anywhere from twice to four times as often as their white counterparts.