Springfield MO Police Got A Toxic Relationship With Black Residents!

Springfield, Missouri Police have a history of police brutality against Black residents.

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A city that’s 220 miles from St. Louis, Missouri is in the spotlight. The city of Springfield, Missouri has a controversial history of bad policing.

Thanks to @Fiftyshadesofwhey for the video.

Springfield, Missouri Police have a brutal history of police violence. In the video shared on social media, a man is peacefully recording a police encounter in his neighborhood. The police officer gets out of his vehicle, verbally abuses him and then places him under arrest.

What the fuck is going on here?

You can film police encounters.

Trust me, they allow COPS and Live P.D. to be in the cruisers.

Anyway, Missouri has a controversial history of pulling Black motorists over more than white motorists. In a report issued last year shows that Black motorists were pulled over 91% of the time in Missouri.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt released a fact finding about racial profiling and saw that it was rampant in the state.

The Missouri NAACP in 2017 issued a travel advisory warning people to be careful while in Missouri because of a danger that civil rights won’t be respected, citing in part the attorney general’s annual report on disparities in police stops.

For example, St. Louis County police were 80 percent more likely to stop black drivers compared to white drivers, when analyzing the total number of police stops. But when only comparing St. Louis County drivers, data show black drivers were more than twice as likely to be pulled over.

In the Kansas City-area city of Blue Springs, which is 87 percent white based on 2010 census data and close to Interstate 70, black drivers in general were 275 percent more likely to be stopped. When isolating stops to residents, data show black drivers were nearly three times as likely to be stopped compared to white resident drivers.

“That is worrisome, because now we have a more accurate indicator of disparity because the population base is, if you will, the correct one,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist who analyzed the data for the attorney general’s office.

Police officers in Springfield, Missouri assault a man for recording them pic.twitter.com/6PgAJw3pVz

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) December 3, 2020

Anybody with some police protocol knowledge wanna weigh in on this?? I was downtown in Springfield, Missouri pic.twitter.com/BluquRt2zZ

— Gummy (@montgomeryskye) August 26, 2018

The 2018 report comes nearly five years after protesters in Ferguson drew national attention to longstanding concerns about police treatment of black communities following the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown, a black, unarmed 18-year-old who lived in the St. Louis suburb.

So as the news came forth, Springfield Police had to do damage control.

As recommended by the Attorney General, we also take a deeper dive into the numbers internally. After receiving data from officers in the field, we use a nationally-recognized mathematical formula to determine the “binomial probability,” which shows the possibility that racial profiling exists for a specific officer. If any officers are shown to have a potential for bias while conducting traffic stops, we then take a second look at the circumstances surrounding that officer and all their stops. The officer is then interviewed by their direct supervisor, who completes a report documenting their findings, which are reviewed by the officer’s chain of command. Chief Williams reviews all the information and determines if further action (I.e. training, discipline) should be taken.

After the yearly analysis is completed, Chief Paul F. Williams meets with minority leaders in the community, historically with the Springfield NAACP, to share the results of the review and talk about action steps for moving forward.

@sherzogNL did you see this video? https://t.co/pmZWg9H3Y0 via @YouTube

— SGF Beer Buzz (@sgfbeerbuzz) December 3, 2020

SPD, at the request of the NAACP, employed a third-party researcher formerly with Missouri State University to comb through the data and compile reports that summarize the findings pertaining to racial disparities in traffic stops, vehicle searches, driver arrests, and contraband seized.  That information is valuable through the links above. 

SPD, at the request of the NAACP, employed a third-party researcher formerly with Missouri State University to comb through the data and compile reports that summarize the findings pertaining to racial disparities in traffic stops, vehicle searches, driver arrests, and contraband seized.  That information is valuable through the links above. 

Every step of this process, from our training techniques to our early intervention system, is taken very seriously at the highest levels of the department. We understand our community’s concern and we hope that by opening the lines of communication, we can show our citizens that we are allies and want to UNITE in our efforts to help our community feel safe, and free from bias in police decision making.

Springfield, Missouri.

At the Springfield Police Department, we take several precautions to ensure that discrimination does not play a role in our traffic stops.

The first proactive set of measures we take to guard against biased-based policing is during the hiring process. Before an individual is ever accepted into the academy, our background investigators check to make sure the candidate does not have a history of behavior that would suggest they have biases that could hinder their decision-making abilities.

If the candidate is accepted into the academy, they will undergo 12 hours of cultural diversity, racial profiling and implicit bias training. Further training continues after the academy and every year all SPD officers receive a minimum of one hour of similar training.

We take our precaution efforts to the next level with an early intervention system which is designed to collect and scrutinize traffic stop data to ensure racially motived behavior does not exist.

Missouri law allows the governor to strip state funding from police agencies that don’t comply with the state’s racial profiling law. State Budget Director Dan Haug said at least as far back as 2015, that has not occurred.

Springfield is located in Greene County, Missouri. The city has a population of 175,000 residents. The Springfield-Branson metropolitan area has over 530,000 residents. It is dubbed the "Queen City of the Ozarks," "The 417" and the "Birthplace of Route 66." Country music is very popular in the city.

It was once known as a town for lynching Black residents.