(Seguin) — A group has been working behind the scenes in Seguin to begin to address the relationship between police officers and the African-American community. The group has been calling itself the Community Coalition. It’s a small group that includes some elected officials, law enforcement leaders, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, and local pastors from some historically Black churches in Seguin. The group had its first public discussion about its work, most of that discussion focused on data from the Seguin Police Department.
Seguin Police Chief Terry Nichols they’ve had some difficult discussions during their meetings, and that led him and the command staff to sit down and begin to explore their operations. They took a critical look at the data to try to determine if there was a bigger story to be told.
Chief Nichols says they started by looking at the overall demographics of the city of Seguin, which is roughly 53 percent Hispanic, 40 percent white, and seven percent African-American. He says they compared that to the makeup of the department, and it showed that the Seguin PD largely reflects the diversity of the city.
“Does our department represent the community that we serve? You can see that we are very close. We have three black officers, two are detectives and one is a supervisor and 41 percent are white officers and 54 percent are Hispanic, so we have a total authorized strength of 59. We are down one right now, so we have 58 folks. So, we are pretty close to our population demographics. Civilian staff is close as well, not too far off – 22 civilian staff. We have one black civilian employee, more than half are Hispanic and 41 percent are white. So, we are pretty good as far as representing our community I believe,” said Nichols.
Nichols says they then looked at the arrest data. Those numbers showed that Hispanics accounted for 64 percent of the arrest. The numbers were 13 percent for African Americans and 22 percent for whites. Nichols says those numbers led them to start to ask even more questions about their operation.
“We started asking ourselves some hard questions. Why are blacks and Hispanics arrested at a higher rate than they are represented in the population and whites are arrested lower? That’s a hard question. We started looking at each other. Our command team said ‘okay, we’ve got some digging to do.’ Our we targeting them — look at ourselves — are we targeting a certain demographic for a reason? Well sometimes yes. In talking through it with the team that is here, in 2016, we targeted the Mexican American gang. Okay, that’s obviously of our Hispanics. But there was only about 20 arrest that year. That really didn’t put a dent percentage wise into those numbers. There was another year that we targeted the Mexican Mafia again and we also targeted a Crips gang which was predominantly black so the other numbers came up a little bit there but not enough to significantly do it over a five year period of time,” said Nichols.
Nichols says the more they explored this issue, the more they knew that they had to continue to dig into this data.
“Do they commit more crimes? Does a certain demographic commit more crimes in this community? Are they caught more frequently? Are there more repeat offenders? We went through this one kind of hard because the officers that have been here long time, know a certain person or persons that are what we call frequent fliers that we’ve arrested numerous times based on either alcoholism, substance abuse or whatever the case may be so we looked at a couple of them where they literally had 14-15 arrests in a single year but again, it only moved the percentage point one or two points. It’s not enough to really address the issue,” said Nichols.
The raw arrest numbers made it difficult to answer some of those questions, so Chief Nichols says they expanded the scope of their data dive. He says Lt. Mike McCann is the one who suggested that they look at the overall data on suspects that they pursue. This would provide a wider snapshot than what can be gleaned from arrest records alone.
“Let’s not look at the arrests just that. Let’s look at who we are going after whether we are doing it ourselves or our community is calling us to go after these – I say go after them, but they are the suspects that we are after. Those numbers match up almost perfectly. That makes a little bit of sense. It helps us explain some of this. I say let’s dig deeper. So, it’s all about field generated arrests. If we are picking on a certain demographic – I say picking or if we are targeting a certain demographic in this community whether it be whites, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, whoever – the easiest way to do that is what we call field generated calls. Things that we go do ourselves, traffic stops, stopping you if you are walking down the road, you are parked at the park and I get out and find out what you are doing at the park. Those things that we do, that we initiate, we call field generated arrests,” said Nichols.
The field generated arrest data seemed to clearly show that when officers initiate contact based on their own reactions and not a response to a call for service — that officers did not appear to target any particular group. Nichols suggests that means his officers are not using racial profiling practices when they make stops based on their own judgment. He says the numbers change a bit when you start to look at the calls that come in from the community. He says they have no control over those calls, because when they are called, they will always respond.
“Under half the time, it’s stuff that we are doing – our officers are initiating. More than half the time, the community is calling us to a problem. If the community calls us to a problem, we deal with whatever hand we are dealt – white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, male, female — we deal with whatever we are dealt with – more than half the time so that’s kind of the takeaway there,” said Nichols.
Chief Nichols says they also looked at data regarding traffic stops. He says the numbers here show that white drivers are more likely to be stopped, but he says it is not clear why that is the case. The data was compared to the demographic makeup of the city of Seguin, but that number wouldn’t reflect the large number of drivers who live outside the city limits, but who also live, work, shop, play and drive inside the city limits.
“What’s interesting here is you notice, why are whites stopped at higher rates representing the population than Hispanics? Hispanics are lower and blacks are about equal. So, again, we are asking ourselves, why is that? Are we targeting Whites? Are they our driving population? What about the transient population coming through town you know on 123 and 46 and 1-10, all those kinds of places. So, these are the questions, again, we are asking ourselves so the benchmark that we use for percentages is Census and what we are learning is that Census is probably not the best way to gauge this because that may not be your true driving population. So, as we move forward in looking at our traffic stop data in future years, we are going to try to find other benchmarks to finally find who is our driving population,” said Nichols.
Nichols covered a lot of data during his presentation to the Seguin City Council on Tuesday night. He says one area that really got his attention was the police department’s use of force numbers. He says the data clearly shows that their use of force numbers is low. He says it’s true for traffic stops and for calls for service.
“If you just look through the traffic stops, if you take those numbers, the five years’ worth of traffic stops, that’s 57,000 traffic stops over five years. If you did the math there, it would be .24 percent of the time we used force. But again, that’s just traffic stops. Think of all the calls that we get called to Walmart and HEB and people’s homes for disturbances – all the other contacts we have with people every day that we don’t use force and they are not calculated in here. We do not use force on them. So that number can easily be 80,000, 90,000, 100,000 contacts we have with people in this community every year over five years and we use force .24 percent of the time,” said Nichols.
The presentation was meant to make the council and the community aware of the work of the Community Coalition and to educate the public about the work of the police department, using data to try to explain its overall operation and interactions with the public.
Councilman Jeremy Roy has been part of the Community Coalition since these conversations first got started earlier this summer. He says all of the parties involved made a good faith effort to try to sit down and have some frank conversations on race and law enforcement.
“It started very organically. We went when the first Black Lives Matter event was organized, the chief and Rusty (Suarez) and Mike (McCann) and myself, we went there to meet the organizers and what grew out of that was relationship. By the end of the evening, we were at a first name basis. We were exchanging phone numbers and we were beginning to talk about real issues,” said Roy.
Roy says the whole Seguin PD data presentation on Tuesday night was tied, in large part, to the discussions that got started with the coalition. He says the police department sharing its data and its attempt to breakdown and explain those numbers, help to tell a big part of the story. But he says he knows that more dialogue is needed to continue to improve these relationships.
“This is about the conversations going on nationally where the questions are arising what is the relationship between law enforcement and Black men so we were meeting with some of those that are leaders in our African-American community, pastors of churches. There was representation there from NAACP and from the MLK Committee and other groups but it was just really 12 or 13 of us and what we began to learn from one another — and the mayor met with us the three times that we met sort of formally — so, this presentation comes out of that. When King wrote his letter from Birmingham Jail, he said there’s four things necessary. If you are going to protest in a nonviolent way or if you have something you want to achieve as a community, he says there’s four basic steps. He said the collection of facts to determine whether injustice exist, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. We are very much still in that collection of facts and that is what this presentation has really been all about,” said Roy.
Chief Nichols says there’s some good news in the data they presented, but he also recognizes there’s more studying and more work that needs to be done. He says they definitely need to also continue to try to find ways to build a positive relationship with more members of the community, especially young people of color.
“The Community Coalition group was right. We do need to engage with our youth, not just the little youth but the teenagers when they are really critical – that pivot point because what we are seeing across the country, we don’t want to happen here and if we can engage them and we respect them and they respect us, they are not fearful of us then I think it’s only a win-win,” said Nichols.
The presentation on the police data and the coalition was warmly received by members of the city council, who thanked the police department for its service, and its professionalism. It was again pointed out that the Seguin Police Department is one of only a handful of law enforcement agencies to be part of the Law Enforcement Recognition Program. The program offered by the Texas Police Chief’s Association is a voluntary and rigorous set of guidelines and operating principles that focus on 164 best practices for law enforcement. The association says it’s a difficult process, which is why there are only a handful of agencies that have qualified. They say the best practices included in the program are designed to assist law enforcement agencies in the efficient and effective delivery of service, the reduction of risk, and the protection of the rights of individuals in each community.
The work of the coalition has all been done behind the scenes, but Tuesday represented a change for the group to expand and engage more individuals in this overall conversation.