Neither carried a backpack. It was not long before Warren and his friend fell under the suspicion of Boston police officer Luis Anjos. After one said, “Hey fellas”, Warren ran up a hill, away from the officers. The officer ordered him to stop, and saw him “clutching the right side of his trousers”, which the officer thought suggested he was carrying a gun with a holster.
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In its opinion, the court cited data from a 2014 report from the ACLU of MA, which found that blacks were disproportionally stopped in the city of Boston, in addition to data from the police department itself. Two of the suspects were described as wearing hoodies, and one had dark clothing. The justices also noted the lack of key physical characteristic descriptors, such as hairstyle, skin tone and height. The ruling also stated that the description of the suspects was so vague (referring to the clothing referenced as “ubiquitous”), that Warren was only stopped on an ultimately unjusitifed “hunch”. He decided “to figure out who they were and where they were coming from and possibly do [a field interrogation observation (FIO)]”.
“If we’re truly serious about strengthening the relationship between police and community, we’ve got no choice but to take this ruling seriously and to implement meaningful reforms”, she said.
The stunning ruling came five years after Jimmy Warren was chased by Boston police because he matched the description of a suspect who was “a black man wearing dark clothing” and arrested for illegal possession of a firearm.
Secondly, the court cited an American Civil Liberties Report charging the Boston Police Department with “a pattern of racial profiling of black males” to say blacks who flee police are not necessarily indicating guilt but may be reasonably seeking to avoid the “indignity” of discrimination. During the same time period, just under one in every four city residents were black.
In an interview, Matthew Segal, the legal director of the Massachusetts ACLU, called Tuesday’s ruling “tremendously significant decision”.
In other words, if a black man flees an approaching police officer that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to justify “reasonable suspicion” in stopping and interrogating him, as first reported by WBUR News.
The judges wrote: “We do not eliminate flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis whenever a black male is the subject of an investigatory stop”. Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. “Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity”.
Segal told WBUR he was pleased with the ruling.
As protests and controversy continue to erupt around the country over police shootings of black men-riots broke out in Charlotte, N.C. just today over the death of Keith Lamonte Scott at the hands of police-the ruling is a notable embrace by a state supreme court of numerous fears articulated by Black Lives Matter activists.
“The racial composition of Boston neighborhoods drove police-civilian encounters even after controlling for crime rates and other factors”, the organization said.
The victim of the home invasion had previously told police that the suspects were two men wearing black hoodies and a third man wearing a red hoodie.
Police Commissioner William Evans said he was disappointed by the ruling.
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In San Francisco, a report on law enforcement practices commissioned by the District Attorney’s office found that, “although black people accounted for less than 15% of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42% of all non-consent searches following stops”. “That report clearly shows that we were targeting the individuals that were driving violence in the city and the hot spots”.
