OFF THE WIRE
Written by
Mary Beth Pfeiffer
poughkeepsiejournal.com
Alpheus James was shocked with a stun gun in April 2010. He believes the traffic stop was racially motivated. / POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL
The police call came in for an “emotionally disturbed person” who had poured spaghetti sauce in an apartment stairwell. With emergency responders at hand, a City of Newburgh officer urged the woman, 53, to go to a hospital.
“You honky!” she shouted. “Go back to Mars!”
The woman — “enraged,” the police report states — ran to the kitchen for a knife, was tackled, bit the officer and, finally, was shocked twice with a stun gun, commonly called a Taser.
The woman was black — by no means the reason she was stunned given the circumstances. But race clearly plays a role in Taser incidents locally, perhaps, as the woman’s comment suggests, on the side of both those stunned and those who stun.
Blacks are subjected to painful electric shocks from stun guns far more than whites, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal study of 467 Taser use reports from 19 local police agencies.
Among Taser cases of City of Newburgh police, blacks comprised 78 percent of those shocked, and they made up 61 and 53 percent of stun-gun subjects in the cities of Poughkeepsie and Kingston. That’s almost four times the proportion of blacks in the Kingston population, more than double their proportion in Newburgh and just under twice that in Poughkeepsie, according to census figures. The biggest imbalance was in the Town of Newburgh, where five times the proportion of blacks were shocked as there are blacks in the town.
Police say they do not target blacks and that they try to use the stun device only when necessary to control and arrest suspects. The large share of blacks stunned aligns with the over-representation of people of color in the criminal justice system, an outgrowth, experts say, of complex social and economic factors.
As with the Journal’s analysis, a 2011 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union also found disproportionate use of stun guns on minorities, who represented 58 percent of cases from eight New York police forces. The phenomenon “echoes consistent and disturbing practices of over-policing in communities of color,” the study said.
“No one can be surprised at the numbers you have reported in your investigation,” said Tracy Givens-Hunter, criminal justice chairwoman for the Southern Dutchess NAACP, in an e-mail. “Tasering is another form of electrocuting a person. Only the police get to do it on the spot. No trial or sentencing.”
Elouise Maxey, president of the Northern Dutchess NAACP, called the number of blacks subjected to Tasers in the City of Poughkeepsie “astronomically high.”
But police insist they are even-handed.
“The criminal element of ANY population is very small and has nothing to do with the color of anyone’s skin,” wrote Newburgh City Chief Michael Ferrara in an e-mail. “Subjects tasered have to do with behavior.”
“We’re more concerned with the circumstances in which it’s used,” agreed City of Poughkeepsie Chief Ron Knapp. “We don’t say, ‘We tased a minority yesterday, we can’t tase a minority today.’”
Arrests high
Kingston police said it would be more accurate to compare the share of black arrests to blacks involved in stun-gun uses. State figures show that blacks accounted for 43 percent of arrests by Kingston police from 2006 to 2010, while they were 53 percent of people subjected to stun devices. The city is 15 percent black, according to 2010 census figures.“We have a seven-block area that is disproportionately responsible for the crime rate in our city,” Bonse said. “You have to look at the demographics of that seven-block area” located in midtown Kingston.
Chief Michael Clancy of the Town of Newburgh police similarly said blacks account for a large share of arrests — about 30 percent of the total from 2008 to 2011, he said. But that is still half the proportion of people shocked with stun guns, which was 60 percent black. Clancy countered that the 60 percent figure was based on 25 incidents, a small number, while the town was also coping with crime related to several nightclubs.
“These are basically inner-city crowds coming in to the Town of Newburgh,” he said.
Alpheus James, who was hit with a single shock from a stun gun in 2010 after being stopped on suspicion of drunken driving, believes the incident was racially motivated, though he acknowledges having two drinks before driving.
A large man with a booming voice, James said a deputy sheriff pulled him over early one morning and ordered him out of his car — “roughing me up like,” in what James, who is black, took for a display of “white power.” He said he would not submit to a breathalyzer test, after which things quickly devolved.
According to the officer’s report, James “began yelling at officer, being aggressive, and accusing the officer of racism.” The officer’s report said James tried to flee to his car and drive away, prompting the officer to use his Taser on him. James said he was reaching into his car for his registration. The officer who stunned James accounted for a quarter of all Taser uses in the sheriff’s department, which officials said is related to his high-volume job as a DWI officer.
“He Taser me so bad,” said James, who has a Jamaican accent. “He was on me for awhile. I said, ‘What’s wrong with you, man? I don’t do nothing.’ ”
James, who had no other drunken driving convictions and was recently laid off after 37 years with the same company, said he paid $2,500 in legal fees and several thousand dollars in fines and fees.
The NYCLU study also showed racial disproportions across the state. In Albany, with a population that is 28 percent black, 68 percent of Taser uses involved black people; blacks were also over-represented in stun-gun cases in Syracuse and Rochester, which the report called “troubling.”
Maxey, the Northern Dutchess NAACP head, is concerned about the impact of stun guns on minorities. In a statement in response to the Journal’s findings, she wrote, “I believe that Tasers are cruel and inhumane, and are the new replacement for brutal beatings or shootings by some officers who are quick to use unnecessary force.”
Said Givens-Hunter of the Southern Dutchess NAACP: “Police need to be better trained; their reports need to be better documented, and they need to be held accountable when (stun guns are) used unnecessarily.”
