Bias in the Boulder County Police Department
In 2020 and 2021 Boulder County, in Colorado was listed as the best place in the country to live. After fairing well from the COVID-19 pandemic, a high quality of life, and promising market Boulder took the highest rating for two years in a row. Home to the University of Colorado, stunning views, and a sense of community this can be understood. But, is this true for all residents?
Let’s start by considering Boulder’s history. First of all, the University was built on stolen land where thousands of Native American communities once called home. And to seize this land we slaughtered thousands of lives, a local example being the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. Historical racism and oppression doesn’t go away –it just changes form. This assimilation is still seen today through educational oppression, disproportionate policing, and residential exclusion.
This oppression was then exacerbated by the Ku Klux Klan, which was active in numerous cities across Colorado. They held control of the government up to to at least 1932, and were particularly active in Denver. Klan members were celebrated in Boulder holding four parades, with one rallying up to 300 members in 1922. This sentiment created a hostile environment for any individual of color, but attacks were targeted to Latino individuals. Not only were they physically attacked, the Klan worked with the Boulder County Commissioners to deport Latino individuals due to the ‘staggering labor market’.
This oppression is further extended to redlining within Boulder County. It was discussed in the “El Diario de la Gente,” an editorial published in the late 1970s. At the time, this was a concern minimized in newspapers showing further media marginalization of these racial issues. This can directly mirror issues in Boulder County today: high and unlivable housing prices.
Now let’s consider the racial landscape of Boulder in 2018. Boulder was 70% White with 13% Hispanic, 1% Black, 5% Asian, and 1% American Indian / Alaskan Native. It is reported by testimony provided by Derrick Jones that Black individuals in Boulder experience micro aggressions, with interactions centering around their race. They are approached with comments asking if they play football, where they are from, or if they have low IQ. These comments extend beyond citizens into law enforcement. Micro-aggressions are also reported in The Boulder Weekly reporting that Black individuals are stopped and questioned after a robbery.
A direct instance of this was a hostile interaction between the Boulder police department and Zayd Atkinson a Naropa Student. Atkinson was collecting trash outside of his house at 8:30 am in 2019. Officers from the Boulder Police Department accused Atkinson of trespassing and needed to escalate the situation. Officers then decided a taser was not sufficient and needed to draw their guns. Here is some of the body camera footage linked here. Atkinson was outside of his home and the officer did not have probable cause to even charge Atkinson with a crime.
The incident report explained “During his interview, the subject officer stated that at this point, he was unaware of Mr. Atkinson’s race, because he had only seen him from a distance and approached him from behind.” BPD Executive Summary. At this point refers to when the officer first approached Atkinson, it was from the back. Regardless of race, police stops in Boulder are proportionate — circa 2018 (we will get into the data later), and in fact BPD pull over White individuals 90% of the time. The policing in Boulder becomes disproportionate once the officers have identified the individual’s race. This incident, and others, caused for the Police Oversight Panel to be created.
Since then the Police Oversight Panel has created policies to change how officers use force too. This was in response to the creation of the Citizens Oversight Group to serve as a liaison between the panel and the department. These changes came after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Prior to these changes, one Boulder Police Department Officer used force on residents 81 times between January 2017 and June 2020. He no longer works for the Boulder Police Department, however, this effect may still hold terror in the community.
What is the Police Oversight Panel doing to stop flaming issues around race? Well publish data to start. On Boulder Open Data an anonymized source posted two data sets, “Police Stop Outcomes” and “Demographics of Stops”. The side panel claims they will update the data annually, but it looks like they stopped this practice in 2020 — when they published the data from 2018. These data sets can be used for external evaluation research to keep the police accountable. It seems though currently, on the Police Oversight Panel they have two data analysts who are responsible for internal review. Both Daniel Reinhard, a chief data analyst and Sam Zhang responded to my ask for additional documentation of the police outcomes data. However, it was four business days after my original request. As of writing this article I am still waiting for a response on police stop outcome documentation.
It is to note this may limit generalization of the use of this data set. I had to best interpret the data as it as. They did not share the documentation because “the data dictionary would likely be more confusing (e.g., unintuitive database codes)” (Daniel Reinhard). What is the point of a data dictionary then? Is it not to clarify the complex data presented? Another point Reinhard made was the age of the data. The data was last updated in 2018, so at this point it is five years old, however, there is not an updated point of data to refer from. It is important to note that the generalizations made in this article may be out of date due to recent police reform. However, the articles that were cited in this were newer than 2018.
So, knowing this, what does Boulder Policing look like to the public? After all- this was the most recent data set published for public use. On the surface, it looks like the policing by Boulder County is proportionate to the makeup of the county. In this data set the police identify the individuals race or ethnicity based on looks. Additionally, they classify anyone who may identity as more than one race as ‘other’ which may further limit this generalization; however, this proportion is small which is why it was disregarded in this analysis. The percentage of police stops who are White is 90%, which is actually 13% higher than the demographic composition. For all other racial groups, except Black individuals, are underrepresented in police stops. Black individuals experience 3% higher stops than their representation in Boulder County demographics at 0.1%. This means Black individuals are pulled over four times more likely than any other Person of Color.
This is where the bias begins to creep in. The average stop time for White individuals is 11.42 minutes and for Asian individuals it is the lowest at 10.11 minutes. The highest stop time out of the entire data set is 400 minutes, and for a White individual. Subsequently, there are many other stops for White individuals that are higher which should skew the average, but due to the longer stops on average, a discrepancy is created.For Black, Hispanic, and American Indian Alaskan Native (AIAN) populations it is on average one minute longer. This could suggest different tactics and interactions between these groups because of the time discrepancy. What is taking up this additional time during stops?
The amount of times stopped for individuals by race appears to be proportionate over the course of the year. Above are two graphs, one shows the total police actions by day and the following shows this by all groups except for White.
First, this can be seen in the frequency of action taken against different racial groups. To find these I took the total number of police interactions by race and totaled the type of action. The first set of these interactions are directly related to charges taken beyond the police interaction. For all kinds of charges Black and AIAN populations experience higher rates than White, Hispanic, and Asian groups.
Black Individuals over twice as likely to be arrested. This holds true for AIAN populations as well. This is staggering. AIAN populations face a considerable amount of policing in Boulder, and in some cases higher than Black Individuals. People who the police identify as AIAN are just under half as likely to be charged with a municipal violation. They also have the highest rates of warnings issued in comparison to other groups. Additionally, Black and AIAN individuals are not charged at higher rates than White, Hispanic, or Asian individuals. This means they are getting stopped at unnecessary rates in comparison to their counterparts.
AIAN encounters also have no reports of the police placing probable cause on them before their stop. This means these individuals are being stopped, warned, and arrested at higher rates and there is less cause for these individuals to be stopped. Black individuals also have about .75 times higher rates of probable cause being placed on them. This holds true for being called suspicious. Hispanic, AIAN, and Black individuals have this status imbued in just under half the amount White individuals do.
These assumptions made by the Boulder Police are occurring after the stop has taken place and they were able to racially profile the individual. This is apparent through the differences in rate of “incident to arrest” and “nothing seized”. Incident to arrest (according to what I could find, not the data dictionary) means they are searching the individual and nothing seized means nothing was found. White individuals are searched in about 0.006% of interactions with the police. In comparison Hispanic individuals are searched more at about 0.008%. This is where the stark difference comes in — AIAN individuals are searched 0.012% and Black individuals at 0.014%. This is over half.
But are these searches within reason? No, not really. In the interactions with incident to arrest Black and AIAN individuals have nothing seized at a higher frequency than White, Hispanic, and Asian individuals.
So what do these findings mean? In 2018, the Boulder Police Department stopped people proportionately, but once their race has been identified the course of actions change. This has been demonstrated numerous times in different kinds of actions taken by the Boulder Police Department. The Boulder Police Department may have made policy changes between 2018 and now, however they do not have the data published to demonstrate if it is working. From what this data analysis presented it is blaringly clear that the Boulder Police Department has bias and it become apparent in their policing patterns.
Overall, the Boulder Police Department needs to make changes, and it has been clear they have been working towards this in the creation of panels. But are their resources and time actually working? It is hard to tell externally because of their lax response time as well as no public use data. Ultimately, new evaluation needs to be presented. It should be done in a timely matter, as their website originally promised yearly updates. Available data should have all the necessary information published to keep the Boulder Police Department accountable.
So, is Boulder the best place to live in the United States? Well, it might only be the case if you are White.
