You Can’t Be Black While …

It happened to State Rep. Robyn Porter in New Haven when she first became a legislator. An officer subtly accused her of having stolen her legislative license plates.

It happened to former Major League Baseball player Doug Glanville while he was shoveling out his driveway in Hartford. And it happened to UCONN Professor Cato Laurencin after he pulled into a gas station parking lot in Farmington to use his cell phone.

“It” was being racially profiled by a police officer.

Glanville was randomly confronted by a West Hartford officer looking for a black man who had allegedly been peddling his shoveling services in violation of that city’s solicitation ban.

Laurencin was trying not to draw the attention of police by using his phone while driving. But the cop asked what he was doing and decided to run his plates anyway.

All three told their stories at the state Capitol Wednesday as part of a panel discussion about racial profiling, moderated by former New Haven State Rep. Bill Dyson, who now chairs the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Advisory Board.

The discussion grew from the recent joint reporting efforts of The Undefeated, an ESPN website that reports on the intersection of race, culture, and sports, and the National Geographic to collect the stories of people of color across the U.S. racially profiled specifically in traffic stops. (Read the article here.)

The subject is particularly hot now that Starbucks has come under fire for the recent arrest of two men who happened to be black while waiting in a Philadelphia location of the coffee giant for a friend. The backlash and call for a boycott have been so strong that the company is shutting down all 8,000 of its U.S. stores May 29 for implicit bias training.

New Haveners like Porter and the Rev. James Newman III were featured in The Undefeated article alongside other Connecticut residents, and even the wealthiest black man in the United States, Denver-based multibillionaire software investor, Robert Smith. All of them had a story of being pulled over by police, sometimes with no explanation, other times accused of traffic violations or other crimes that they adamantly deny committing.

The author of the article, Michael Fletcher, a senior writer for The Undefeated, said Wednesday that he chose subjects from this state partly because Connecticut is among the best in the country at collecting and analyzing its traffic stop data. He said when he wrote about the phenomenon of ​“driving while black” back in 1996 for The Washington Post, the term was newly coined and the evidence mainly anecdotal. He said his article back then created ​“a little buzz laced with a lot of skepticism.”

Back then people wanted to know if black folks were disproportionately breaking traffic laws or carrying contraband at higher rates than their white counterparts. Today, because of the work of states like Connecticut, people know that black and Latino drivers don’t violate traffic laws more than their white counterparts and that in fact, their white counterparts are more likely to have contraband.

Porter said that incident four years ago still stays with her.

“I understood why I had been pulled over,” she said. ​“I was a black woman with legislative plates, so the officer assumed they were stolen. That just does something to you when you’re a law-abiding citizen playing by the rules. It makes you think, ​‘Why am I being harassed?’

“Most of the time as a black woman I feel invisible. That is one time I wished I really was invisible.”

She said when the cop realized that the plates were hers and not stolen, he was embarrassed and apologetic. But by then a trust had been broken.

Porter, who represents Newhallville and Hamden, said members of her community are simultaneously over-policed and underprotected largely because of racial profiling and the assumption of criminality in poor and minority neighborhoods. She has become among the leaders in the legislature pushing for tougher accountability rules for police officers who abuse their authority. She has faced fierce opposition from her more conservative colleagues and police unions around the state.

“There are times when we need to call the police but we don’t because we may end up dead,” Porter said. ​“That’s not something that is make-believe. That has actually happened.”

Doug Glanvillle, the former MLB player co-signed Porter’s concerns, pointing out that his wife once called the police after his own profiling incident because a strange man had shown up to the door of their home. He said that before his wife could describe the man, the dispatcher asked whether the man was black or Hispanic, which she thought was strange. But later it made her think about what it would mean if Glanville came home, it was dark, and the police, looking for a black or Hispanic man, jumped to the wrong conclusion? Or didn’t bother to ask enough questions? Or if he couldn’t answer fast enough or to their satisfaction?

“She realized that by calling the police that she could be putting me in danger, making me a suspect,” he said.

After his experience of racial profiling while shoveling snow, Glanville wrote about his experience in The Atlantic in 2014. That eventually led to legislation barring municipal police from crossing over municipal borders to enforce a local ordinance.

Though Laurencin’s incident in Farmington wasn’t the first time he’d been stopped for ​“breathing while black,” he said it was what drove him to join the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Advisory Board as a community member because he wanted to be involved in something that might effect change. (Read the project’s latest traffic stop analysis here.) He admitted his frustration when it comes to racial profiling, people aren’t always willing to agree that it is even a thing.

Ken Barone, who serves as the project’s manager, said that the stories of racial profiling are important to reform efforts because they put a face on the data that unequivocally show that black and Latino drivers in Connecticut and many other places are stopped at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts. They’re also stopped disproportionately for reasons for which their white counterparts aren’t stopped, like a busted head or tail light, or a missing front plate.

White drivers are more likely to be stopped for talking on their cell phone, speeding, or blowing through a traffic light or a stop sign. Black and Latino drivers are disproportionately asked if officers can search their vehicles, though officers are less likely to find contraband on those drivers.

He said when police departments are presented with the data they often have to face the reality that their ​“crime reduction strategies are not as effective as law enforcement would like you to believe.”

But getting lawmakers and the profession of law enforcement to acknowledge the data and make change has been frustratingly difficult said project director Andrew Clark, who noted that as a white man he endured traffic stops and he believed particularly in his youth that they were always justified. He also noted that he never feared for his life, even in situations when he was being unsafe.

He said when he was young driver growing up in Farmington, he followed a police officer around for five minutes before he was pulled over. The officer was ​“pissed” he recalled, but ​“I didn’t feel I was stoking the bear or even going to be in deep trouble.”