Mitch Perry
A half-hour after Eric Ward was named the new Tampa police chief on Thursday, two city council members joined a coalition of activist groups who again called on the Tampa Police Department to temporarily stop their current bike citation policy.
Council Chairman Frank Reddick and District 7 Councilwoman Lisa Montelione joined members of the ACLU, CAIR, the NAACP and a host of other organizations in Lykes Gas Light Park, calling for the TPD to stop its practices at least until after the U.S. Justice Department finishes its review of the agency’s practices.
It comes after a Tampa Bay Times report showed that 79 percent of the bicyclists given citations in the city have been black.
The two council members at the press conference were evasive when whether they would vote against Ward if he won’t discontinue the practice.
“I won’t make any promises that I will confirm or not confirm,” Reddick said.
“The jury’s still out on that,” was as far as Montelione would say. When asked whether voting against Ward’s confirmation would make Mayor Bob Buckhorn most unhappy, Montelione laughed and said, “‘Not happy’ is an understatement.”
Joyce Hamilton Henry of the ACLU said she and the other members of the coalition want to sit down with Buckhorn and Ward to discuss the bike citation policy.
“We’re calling for a quick investigation by the Department of Justice, and a suspension of the bicycle stops,” she said.
Bruce Haynes, 48 and founder of the group Men in Power, said police officers should offer lights to cyclists who don’t have them: “Why do they have to be handcuffed because they don’t have a light?”
TPD says it’s offered more than 2,000 such lights in the past year.
Haynes said the police are using probable cause to search people.
“I know this for a fact,” Haynes said, who also said he used to live in the College Hill area in East Tampa.
Meanwhile, Buckhorn has conceded little about the stops. In the first interview with the mayor since the Times report came out 13 days ago, Buckhorn told Florida Politics that he thought the story a “one-sided portrayal of the problem.”
“The numbers are what they are,” he said of the report that indicates fact black cyclists have been singled out for stops by the TPD during the past three years. “But they didn’t give equal credence to the success that we have had. We don’t profile people, we target criminals. Pure and simple. That’s it. It’s a high-crime area. We’re going to deploy our resources. We’re going to change our tactics, to make a difference in those neighborhoods.”
The mayor said police go where the crime is:
“You don’t have the same problem in East Tampa that you do in Davis Islands. You just don’t, so it’s not a matter of us profiling folks because of their ethnicity. We’re going after neighborhoods where there are issues and people are committing the crimes, pure and simple.”
Buckhorn, though, said if the Justice Department concludes that changes need to be made, “We will make them, and I’m OK about that.”
Yvette Lewis said she hopes the mayor’s participation in a town hall meeting on Wednesday night where he heard the anger directed at the bike citation policy might turn him around.
“I would hope the mayor would say, ‘I understand, I get it, let’s just set this policy aside,'” she said. “It’s not about egos, it’s about the community.”
A week ago, the mayor rejected calls by the ACLU and others to stop the bike citation process. Unless rebuked by the DOJ, it doesn’t seem likely he’ll stop it anytime soon.
