Editorial: Racial profiling of Latinos must stop in Fort Bend - Houston Chronicle

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Is the Fort Bend County Narcotics Task Force racially profiling?

Based on an investigation by Chronicle reporters Eric Dexheimer and St. John Barned-Smith, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Data show that officers assigned to the task force stop and search Latino motorists at a rate that is statistically impossible unless race is a driving factor. This means that you are more likely to experience a humiliating, hours-long stop by the side of the road if you happen to have a Spanish surname.

This is not unique to Fort Bend — studies have found that if you are Black or brown, you are more likely to be stopped, searched and arrested by police — but that doesn’t make what is going on there any less egregious.

During a two-year period, for example, records show one officer made 819 stops, out of which almost 98 percent of them involved Latinos behind the wheel. He was not alone. Other task force members had similar rates that run counter to the region’s demographics, which put Latinos at 21 percent of the population. Statewide, Latinos are only 40 percent of the population.

The task force is overseen by the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office and includes members from nearby police departments. Contrast its numbers with those of the county’s sheriff’s deputies alone: They reported that fewer than 16 percent of their traffic stops in 2019 were of Latinos.

Racial profiling is against the law in Texas. It is also unconstitutional. But vague statutes that fail to even properly define what represents a violation and no state agency monitoring compliance mean there is little accountability.

A decades-long struggle to remedy this has failed. Simply collecting data to identify which of the state’s nearly 2,000 law enforcement agencies are unfairly targeting minorities has been met with roadblocks.

The Sandra Bland Act, named after the 28-year-old Black woman who died five years ago in a rural Texas jail after a traffic stop, required law enforcement to separate traffic stop data by race. A Chronicle investigation in June discovered that the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, in charge of collecting the information, failed to ask police departments for the breakdown.

The data will now be handled correctly, officials said, and starting next year experts at Texas A&M will analyze and identify patterns of racial profiling. That’s an important first step, but even with proof in hand, no agency has any mandate or power to really do anything about it — something which the Legislature must address in the upcoming session.

The U.S. Department of Justice can investigate law enforcement for discriminatory practices, but cases have been rare during past administrations and nonexistent during President Donald Trump’s tenure.

That means the responsibility falls to the law enforcement agencies themselves, who are loath to investigate their own personnel, and may sometimes not even see the problem.

When questioned about the data, David Marcaurele, chief deputy for the Fort Bend Sheriff’s Office, laid out the task force’s approach to pursuing Mexican drug cartels.

“While we do not target ethnicity it is only logical that if you are performing drug interdiction duties looking for legitimate indicators of potential drug traffickers you would expect that the resultant ethnicity would correlate with whatever ethnicity the drug organizations are using to do this trafficking,” he told the Chronicle.

That may sound like a commonsense strategy, but it’s also a slippery logical slope that posits that all traffickers are Latinos, therefore we stop all Latinos to find traffickers.

This creates more than just an inconvenience for a group of people — again, 40 percent of the Texas population, most of whom are decidedly not drug traffickers. It engenders a mistrust of police that ultimately makes us all less safe.

But what about the results? Is the task force’s targeting of Latinos, at the expense of alienating the entire community, accomplishing any public safety goals that would provide even the slightest validation of the ham-handed strategy?

Nope. Overall, 99 percent of traffic stops by the task force didn’t result in a citation, with even those traveling well over the speed limit receiving only a warning. In the case of the one officer whose stops were almost 98 percent Latino drivers, only a handful of searches have resulted in notable seizures of drugs or money, including 67 pounds of marijuana found in a truck in 2018.

That sounds like an awful waste of time, not to mention tax dollars.

Trever Nehls, who is running to replace his brother, Troy Nehls, as Fort Bend County sheriff, did not respond to a request for comment. His opponent, Eric Fagan, called the task force’s actions a “perfect example of racial profiling.”

“Law enforcement officers must have policies in place that say everyone in the public — who we serve — must be treated fairly, with respect and without bias,” Fagan said.

We agree.

The Fort Bend County Narcotics Task Force has a problem with racial profiling. It needs to change. And so does the state law that allows this discrimination to keep happening across Texas.

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Editorial: Racial profiling of Latinos must stop in Fort Bend - Houston Chronicle
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