Strings Of Discord Amongst the Community!!

By DeShawn Morgan(P SayDat)

"'I did! I did taw a puddy tat!'"by broterham is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Tension is a word used to describe the current atmosphere in modern day Greensboro, North Carolina. The public varies on its position according to location, but the overall sense of trust for the Greensboro Police Department(GPD) is shaky at best. Evidence of this is the recent protest and thrashing of downtown Greensboro by recent riots and protest. This article will shed light on why this sentiment resides within this city, and why despite the protest of officers, this seems to be warranted.

Of particular interest in this case is the Data USA website. According to their data Greensboro, North Carolina is a city that boast of a population of almost three hundred thousand people. Of this number, the recorded diversity rate starts with White or Eurocentric based Caucasians(non-Hispanic) leading 41.9%, followed closely behind by Black or African American(Non-Hispanic) 40.4%. These two groups combined create the vast majority of Greensboro’s population coming to just over 80%. No other population comes anywhere near numerically.

With this in mind, the Greensboro News and Record placed a map on record made by journalist Tim Rickard and in it there is a noticeable disparity amongst the two races in traffic stops in the city. This fact was pointed out by The New York Times Newspaper. The paper claims to have based this statement off of tens of thousands of traffic stops and multiple years of arrest. They reported to have “uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct(NYT)”. Also stating that, “Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population(NYT)”.

The Greensboro Police Department police department denies this, and refuses admit to bias as a part of the profiling of officers, though it does admit to a number of disparities amongst the data collected and analyzed by representatives of the city. Key points can be seen below;

Data put out by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention shows that there is more crime committed nationwide by Caucasians than African Americans. The hit rate of Greensboro, North Carolina is also in accordance with this despite whites being stopped at a lower rate. There was only one segment where African Americans had a higher crime rate statistically but yet, the mass of arrested people and the mass of traffic stops stem from African Americans. It is also statistically viable that Africans-Americans are more likely to suffer violence or brutality at a much higher rate from officers than Caucasians, a point evidenced by the case of Rufus Scales.

Scales is a twenty-six-year-old, who was beaten by the police for stopping his brother from exiting the vehicle due to them not being aware of the cause. Rufus was tazed, pulled out of the car, and drug across the asphalt of the street which caused injury to his person that was accumulating during the process(NYT). This resulted in a charge of assaulting an officer, a chipped tooth, a split lip, and four traffic tickets. And while Rufus’ story is one story that made it to headlines he is not the only African-American in the city to have suffered unwarranted and biased treatment, according to The New York Times Newspaper.

When presented with all of this evidence one can only draw the conclusion that there is bias amongst the unspoken policies of Greensboro, North Carolina, as well within the training it provides its officers; ass the they are the guardians of law. The fact that the Greensboro Police Department(GPD) had conducted its own individual study a year later claiming ‘’that it did not find any proof of racial bias in 2016” but, is now stating that it is working towards reform brings an obvious question to the forefront. Has the city purposely been overlooking and denying a problem that has been impacting almost half of its citizens negatively? Is the distrust in the city warranted? The answer to this question one needs only to look at the evidence and add it up!