Mitch Perry
During her 5 1/2 years as Tampa police chief, Jane Castor been given mostly positive reviews from the media and the community, although high-profile department misdoings have been reported. Nothing, though, has rocked the department more than the revelations published Sunday by the Tampa Bay Times. Reporters Alexandra Zayas and Kameel Stanley wrote that the department has singling out black bicyclists for traffic tickets.
Castor said Wednesday that she thinks the piece is unfair, but has agreed to make changes to the department. That includes calling in the U.S. Department of Justice to review how the TPD handles citing black cyclists for infractions.
“I think that article tried to imply that the Tampa Police Department was in someway racist,” Castor said in her first comments since the story published. “Ask the citizens of Sulpher Springs, East Tampa, Robles Park, if their quality of life has improved. The crime’s been reduced in the neighborhood, and they have a good relationship with the community.
“You’re going to find examples of individuals who don’t have a good relationship with the police, but overall, the relationships are good.”
The Times found that the TPD had written 2,504 bicycling tickets over three years, and 80 percent of those tickets were to black people, who make up only 26 percent of the population.
Castor said the department uses the tools of enforcement and education when dealing with bicycle safety and a concentration of bike thefts occurring the areas of Sulpher Springs, Robles Park and East Tampa. “We ask all of our officers, every single bike stop, that they do it based on the law.”
The chief said that on Tuesday she sat down with officials from the NAACP, the ACLU, the Council on American Islamic Relations and LULAC (The League of Latin American Citizens). “We agree these stats are troublesome, and that we need to review this and we need to decide as a community what we’re going to do about this.”
That includes having Tampa police officials meet monthly at the NAACP’s Hillsborough County offices, “Where citizens can come in and discuss any issues they may have with the Tampa Police Department.”
Castor said the department has contacted Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Department of Justice office that focuses on community-oriented policing, to have his office review the way the department has handled the citation of black cyclists. She said there is no determined period of how far the research will go, saying that she didn’t want to dictate in any way how the DOJ will go about such a report.
The department will also now implement immediately a new tracking system to monitor every traffic stop, ticket, and warning issued, including those for bicyclists.
The ACLU’s Joyce Hamilton Henry watched the press conference from the back of the room in TPD headquarters. She says she was stunned when she read the statistics of black bicycle arrests in the Times story.
“We were shocked by the data, because on the surface, it’s very disturbing.” She said that the ACLU is doing its own analysis “to see what it tells us beyond what was reported in the article.”
Castor attempted to downplay the statistics, saying that out of the more than 101,000 traffic citations the TPD made last year (those include violations involving motor vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians), bike citations were one-half of 1 percent, or 544 overall. Of those 544 bike citations, however, 443 were of black riders. She said a leading trend in crime recently is bicycle thefts, and it’s something the agency is focusing on more often.
The chief spent the first four minutes of the news conference extolling how much the TPD has reduced crime during the past 12 years. She stood behind two maps showing Part 1 offenses in 2003 and Part 1 offenses in 2014, with the neighborhoods with high crime rates rates in red for more than 120 offenses. Part 1 offenses include murder, robbery, forcible rape, burglary, aggravated assault, larceny theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.
The differences were stark, with the maps showing that there were 133 areas coded as “red grid” or high crimes areas in 2002, and only seven such areas in 2014.
Those reduced crime rates reflect a national trend, however. The FBI reported in November that violent crimes in America including murder fell 4.4 percent in 2013 to their lowest number since the 1970s.
Henry of the ACLU says she’s not ready to call what the TPD has been engaged in as “racial profiling,” not yet anyhow. She applauded Castor for the changes announced today.
The Times piece reported that Castor declined to meet with the reporters on the story for weeks, choosing only to answer questions written out in advance. She said Wednesday that her refusal did not mean in any way that she didn’t take the charges seriously.
“We asked to see the data that they had and asked if they could review that to see if in fact there was a problem, and we were not allowed to see that data,” she said. She said she did not agree to a sit-down interview, but responded in written form so that her responses “would not be misconstrued,” adding that she still hasn’t seen the data that the Times used to report their story.
Looking confident throughout most of the 20-minute long news conference, Castor emphasized again and again that she is running “an outstanding agency.”
“The reason we’ve been successful is the relationship with our citizens. They trust that we’re going to do the right thing, and if the citizens didn’t trust the police department, we would be useless. We would be completely ineffective.”
