Driving while black in NC

It’s not good news when The New York Times devotes a lead spot on its Sunday front page and two entire pages inside to a story about how a city’s police officers pull over and charge black drivers at a rate far higher than white drivers. But that was the newspaper’s finding about Greensboro, North Carolina’s third-largest city and the site of the famous Woolworth sit-in of 55 years ago that became a touchstone of the civil rights movement.

The Times analyzed tens of thousands of traffic stops and arrest data to show that in Greensboro, African-American drivers were pulled for traffic stops at a rate far in excess of their percentage of the driving population. Police searched vehicles of black drivers more than twice as often as they did those of white drivers, even though, the story noted, “they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.”

The newspaper also reported that disproportionate minor charges against blacks, often the result of traffic stops where officers have discretion about making charges, result in blacks being the overwhelming majority of defendants in the Guilford County courthouse. In Greensboro, to use just one statistic, black citizens are charged with possession of small amounts of marijuana five times as often as whites are charged. Blacks also are charged with resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer more than four times more often than whites are charged.

Some police chiefs, in fact, discourage officers from filing those charges unless absolutely necessary. And that kind of policy has made a difference in Fayetteville, where a new chief has told his officers to focus on violations such as drunken driving, speeding and ignoring traffic signals and not on more minor offenses. His changes have reduced the disparity that used to exist when black drivers were charged with minor offenses more often.

What’s the explanation in Greensboro? Officials say that police patrol officers focus on high-crime neighborhoods, many of which happen to be predominantly African-American neighborhoods. Therefore, the police say, the arrest rates are higher.

That may provide a partial explanation, but Greensboro is like most medium-sized Southern cities in that there always has been underlying racial tension. City officials in such places are reluctant to examine problems until something happens. But the time to look, to investigate, is before something does happen, and that is what Greensboro City Council members and county officials clearly need to do.

That said, it would be worthwhile for Charlotte, Raleigh and other North Carolina cities to look at traffic-stop statistics to see whether similar racial disparities exist.

This story was originally published October 27, 2015 at 7:32 PM with the headline "Driving while black in NC."