Dayton Suburb Has Pulled Over More Black Motorists But Denies Racial Profiling!

Ohio city faces allegations of racial profiling.

There are three places called Oakwood, Ohio.

Two are villages. One is a city. One is located northeastern Ohio in Paulding County with a population of 620. The other Oakwood is located in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

The city has a population of 3,700.

The Oakwood I am talking about is a suburb of Dayton, Ohio and it has a population of 10,000 residents. It is located in Montgomery County and is only three miles from Dayton's central business district.

The city is under fire for allegedly profiling black motorists. The community's police has been notorious for pulling over more people of color. The Dayton Daily News notes that a community activist group did a study within period to find out how many pullovers involved people of color.

They found that a staggering amount of people who were pulled over for minor infractions were Black men and women. Vehicles that appear "suspicious" to police are often pulled over.

Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE), a non-profit regional law firm that represents low-income individuals and groups in western Ohio. The report recommends the city conduct a fuller analysis and "begin appropriate training to ensure that all people driving in Oakwood are treated fairly and without discrimination."

City officials say they are reviewing the report but said the police department is professional and conducts traffic patrols in order to keep the community safe.

The ABLE report found in Oakwood that year black drivers accounted for 21.9 percent of the traffic stops where a problem with driving or equipment was observed, and 36.8 percent of the stops where a license plate check was run without tickets being written for an observable driving or equipment problem.

To serve and protect.

The total non-white population in Oakwood is less than 7 percent, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and the black population is less than 1 percent.

"These 'license plate check' stops do not result from bad driving or faulty equipment but from an officer’s decision to run the plate of a passing car," said Ellis Jacobs, senior attorney with ABLE. "In these stops, officer discretion is at its greatest. It is striking that such an outsized percentage of these tickets are given to black drivers."

Oakwood denies that their officers deliberately target people of color. However, they are looking into the matter issued in the report.

The ABLE report found that in Oakwood 26 percent of all people ticketed were black, and blacks received 33 percent of all tickets. (Some drivers received more than one ticket.). In the nearby suburb of Kettering, 20.1 percent of the drivers receiving traffic tickets in 2016 were black and they received 23 percent of all tickets issued that year.