Oxford Police Review Commission "Concerned" About Overrepresentation Of Blacks In Local Arrests

By Paige Zagranski

Miami University journalism student

Only 4 percent of Oxford’s population is black, but almost 7 percent of the people arrested by Oxford police last year were black, according to Oxford Police Department records.

The disparity was even worse in summer. In July, blacks were arrested at a rate nine times higher than whites.

Chief John Jones of the OPD denies any racial profiling within his precinct. He says he believes police actually do a better job than society of being objective. They go through extensive training to learn how to leave bias at the door and simply follow the law.

The Oxford Police Community Relations and Review Commission is “concerned” about the number of black arrests, says Miami University professor Amber Franklin, a founding member of the commission, but the issue is not unique to Oxford.

“Although there is not an explicit and deliberate targeting of a community, it is still problematic if it’s implicit,” Franklin says.

The Oxford Police Department tracks the number of arrests and the racial breakdowns of each arrest. The 2016 arrest data was compared to the 2010 census population data for Oxford.

Chief Jones says with traffic stops, most of the time the officer has no idea the race of the driver.

Franklin, an associate professor of speech pathology, pointed out that many officers seem to have the mentality of “no harm, no foul.” However, when someone comes from a community that is unfairly perceived as a potential threat Franklin says “just the interaction alone can feel like a violation of some kind, especially if there was no need for a stop.”

Franklin says the commission needs more data to get the bigger picture. The commission asked the OPD to collect data on the number of stops and encounters that lead to warnings rather than arrests or tickets. She believes this will be valuable in explaining why there are more black arrests.

The OPD is hoping to update their software and add this data to their reports by 2020, Jones says.

Alana Van Gundy-Yoder is an associate professor of justice and community studies on Miami’s Hamilton campus. She says without more information it is impossible to tell if the higher rate of arrests for blacks is due to chance or something else.

In 2016, the OPD did not receive any complaints of racial profiling or bias.

Photo: An Oxford police cruiser sits outside the police station on Saturday afternoon. -- Photo by Kelly Wagner

Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested Alana Van Gundy-Yoder found the arrest rate "alarming." This was incorrect.