Florida sheriff finally admits to ‘bias’ in profiling of Black residents
In Jacksonville Florida, walking while black is a crime, or so it seems after Sheriff Mike Williams admitted that police officers exhibited “implicit bias” and issued a disproportionate amount of pedestrian tickets to Black residents–more than any other race.
ProPublica and the Florida Times-Union reported in the ‘Walking While Black’ series that over a recent five-year period, 55 percent of pedestrian tickets were cited to Black people, who only make up 29 percent of the local population.
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Last year Williams denied that race played a part when those news agencies investigated the claim. Now he’s walking back on those words and accepted the possibility that bias played a significant part.
“Could it have anything to do with implicit bias? Of course it could,” Williams admitted.
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The admission came during a panel discussion with Jacksonville’s top criminal justice officials and was prompted by a Sarasota Herald-Tribune report that said Black defendants were sentenced to more jail time than white defendants.
Williams was pressured to address the disparities in pedestrian citations for Black residents but he said, the differences were “not pronounced enough to indicate racist intent.”
Then what’s the bias?
When it came to bicycle citations, he said the number was too small and insignificant to support the claim that bias played a part.
But audience members weren’t buying that nonsense.
“Hogwash!” shouted Ben Frazier, a community activist who has been vocal on the issue. “Stop defending racism!”
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