Pubdate: Sun, 25 Oct 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Authors: Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew W. Lehren

THE DISPROPORTIONATE RISK OF DRIVING WHILE BLACK

An Examination of Traffic Stops and Arrests in Greensboro, N.C., 
Uncovered Wide Racial Differences in Measure After Measure of Police Conduct.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Rufus Scales, 26 and black, was driving his 
younger brother Devin to his hair-cutting class in this genteel, 
leafy city when they heard the siren's whoop and saw the blue light 
in the rearview mirror of their black pickup. Two police officers 
pulled them over for minor infractions that included expired plates 
and failing to hang a flag from a load of scrap metal in the pickup's 
bed. But what happened next was nothing like a routine traffic stop.

Uncertain whether to get out of the car, Rufus Scales said, he 
reached to restrain his brother from opening the door. A black 
officer stunned him with a Taser, he said, and a white officer yanked 
him from the driver's seat. Temporarily paralyzed by the shock, he 
said, he fell face down, and the officer dragged him across the asphalt.

Rufus Scales emerged from the encounter with four traffic tickets; a 
charge of assaulting an officer, later dismissed; a chipped tooth; 
and a split upper lip that required five stitches.

That was May 2013. Today, his brother Devin does not leave home 
without first pocketing a hand-held video camera and a business card 
with a toll-free number for legal help. Rufus Scales instinctively 
turns away if a police car approaches.

"Whenever one of them is near, I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel 
safe," he said.

As most of America now knows, those pervasive doubts about the police 
mirror those of millions of other African-Americans. More than a year 
of turmoil over the deaths of unarmed blacks after encounters with 
the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Baltimore and elsewhere has sparked a 
national debate over how much racial bias skews law enforcement 
behavior, even subconsciously.

Documenting racial profiling in police work is devilishly difficult, 
because a multitude of factors - including elevated violent crime 
rates in many black neighborhoods - makes it hard to tease out 
evidence of bias from other influences. But an analysis by The New 
York Times of tens of thousands of traffic stops and years of arrest 
data in this racially mixed city of 280,000 uncovered wide racial 
differences in measure after measure of police conduct.

Those same disparities were found across North Carolina, the state 
that collects the most detailed data on traffic stops. And at least 
some of them showed up in the six other states that collect 
comprehensive traffic-stop statistics.

Here in North Carolina's third-largest city, officers pulled over 
African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of 
proportion with their share of the local driving population. They 
used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than 
twice as often as white motorists - even though they found drugs and 
weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.

Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible 
reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was 
black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.

The routine nature of the stops belies their importance.

As the public's most common encounter with law enforcement, they 
largely shape perceptions of the police. Indeed, complaints about 
traffic-law enforcement are at the root of many accusations that some 
police departments engage in racial profiling. Since Ferguson erupted 
in protests in August last year, three of the deaths of 
African-Americans that have roiled the nation occurred after drivers 
were pulled over for minor traffic infractions: a broken brake light, 
a missing front license plate and failure to signal a lane change.

Violence is rare, but routine traffic stops more frequently lead to 
searches, arrests and the opening of a trapdoor into the criminal 
justice system that can have a lifelong impact, especially for those 
without the financial or other resources to negotiate it.

In Greensboro, which is 41 percent black, traffic stops help feed the 
stream of minor charges that draw a mostly African-American crowd of 
defendants to the county courthouse on weekday mornings. National 
surveys show that blacks and whites use marijuana at virtually the 
same rate, but black residents here are charged with the sole offense 
of possession of minor amounts of marijuana five times as often as 
white residents are.

And more than four times as many blacks as whites are arrested on the 
sole charge of resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer, an 
offense so borderline that some North Carolina police chiefs 
discourage its use unless more serious crimes are also involved.

Greensboro police officials said most if not all of the racial 
disparities in their traffic enforcement stemmed from the fact that 
more African-Americans live in neighborhoods with higher crime, where 
officers patrol more aggressively. Pulling over drivers, they said, 
is a standard and effective form of proactive policing.

"The way we accomplish our job is through contact, and one of the 
more common tools we have is stopping cars," Greensboro's police 
chief, Wayne Scott, who is white, said.

Over the years, police officials in cities like New York and Chicago 
have used much the same argument to justify contentious pedestrian 
stop-and-frisk campaigns in high-crime areas. Criminals are less 
likely to frequent crime hot spots, the theory goes, if they know 
that the police there are especially vigilant.

But increasingly, criminologists and even some police chiefs argue 
that such tactics needlessly alienate law-abiding citizens and 
undermine trust in the police. Indeed, in Fayetteville, N.C., 100 
miles southeast of Greensboro, a new police chief has discouraged 
officers from stopping motorists for minor infractions.

Ronald L. Davis, a former California police chief who now runs the 
Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 
questions whether there are any benefits to intensive traffic 
enforcement in high-crime neighborhoods.

"There is no evidence that just increasing stops reduces crime," he 
said, pointing to a recent Justice Department review in St. Louis 
County, which includes Ferguson. The study showed - less convincingly 
than in Greensboro, because of less-specific data - that the police 
treated black motorists more harshly than white ones.

"For any chief who faces those racial disparities, they should be of 
great concern," Mr. Davis said.

Some Greensboro officials are indeed worried. In private meetings 
with black community leaders, Mayor Nancy Vaughan, who is white, has 
asked: "Are we the next Ferguson?" At a recent gathering of hundreds 
of citizens, she told them, "We need to have this conversation before 
it's too late."

A National Uproar

A national uproar over racial profiling erupted in the 1990s after 
New Jersey state troopers were found to have focused on minority 
drivers for traffic stops in hopes of catching drug couriers. 
Thousands of local law enforcement departments and more than a dozen 
state police agencies began collecting traffic-stop information as a result.

In the seven states with the most sweeping reporting requirements - 
Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina 
and Rhode Island - the data show police officers are more likely to 
pull over black drivers than white ones, given their share of the 
local driving-age population.

By itself, that proves little, because other factors besides race 
could be in play. Because African-Americans are, for example, 
generally poorer than whites, they may have more expired vehicle 
registrations or other automotive lapses that attract officers' attention.

More telling, many researchers agree, is what happens after a vehicle 
is pulled over - especially whether officers use their legal 
discretion to search a car or its occupants and whether those 
searches uncover illegal contraband. An officer can conduct a 
"consent search" without any justification if the driver grants 
permission. A search can also be made without consent if an officer 
has probable cause to suspect a crime.

In the four states that track the results of consent searches, 
officers were more likely to conduct them when the driver was black, 
even though they consistently found drugs, guns or other contraband 
more often if the driver was white. The same pattern held true with 
probable-cause searches in Illinois and North Carolina, the two 
states that carefully record them.

Who Is Searched, and Who Has Contraband

In four states that best track stops, blacks were more likely to be 
searched with their consent than whites, even though the police found 
contraband less often.

The chance black drivers or their cars were searched, compared with 
white drivers.

Of these jurisdictions, only the Rhode Island State Police found 
contraband more often among blacks.

Searches are not common - officers in North Carolina, for example, 
conduct them in just one in 40 traffic stops. But they have an 
outsize impact on police-civilian relations. Surveys show that 
minorities, especially blacks, are much less likely than whites to 
say officers acted properly at a traffic stop. But far fewer drivers 
of all races rate the police positively if they are searched.

In most of the states that monitor traffic stops most intensely, 
officials acknowledge that this close attention has not had a 
discernible effect. In Missouri, which has collected data for 15 
years, Chris Koster, the state attorney general, has said the 
differences in how black and white motorists are treated are bigger 
than ever. Similar racial disparities are revealed in the data that 
the Nebraska Crime Commission has collected since 2001, but the 
commission lacks resources to delve into causes or solutions, said 
the agency's information chief, Michael Overton.

"Quite honestly, every year I have to pick up my jaw a little bit 
because the numbers are very, very consistent," he said.

But Rhode Island and Connecticut have each revised practices. After 
studies in 2003 and 2006 found racially disparate treatment at 
traffic stops, Rhode Island revamped its law enforcement training 
regimen. A 2014 study indicated that officers had become more 
judicious, conducting fewer consent and probable-cause searches of 
vehicles, but finding contraband more often.

"It really seemed to have a good impact," said Jack McDevitt, the 
lead researcher and director of the Institute on Race and Justice at 
Northeastern University. "It showed officers can be smarter about searching."

Beginning last year, Connecticut measured every law enforcement 
agency against seven benchmarks, including whether officers stopped 
minorities more often in the daytime, when a driver's race is easier 
to detect. In three cities and two of 12 state police districts, 
state officials said, racial differences in the treatment of 
motorists were unmistakable.

The state is pushing police administrators to explain why. Analysts 
are also comparing traffic-stop data from officers who patrol similar 
beats, which some researchers consider the most reliable way to 
uncover bias, implicit or overt. One change is already in place: 
Officers now must give every stopped motorist a card explaining how 
to file a complaint.

"Racial profiling is a very real phenomenon, and in some places it is 
much worse than others," Mike Lawlor, Connecticut's under secretary 
for criminal justice policy and planning, said.

Across the country, the latest outcries over police-minority 
relations have revived interest in monitoring: California just passed 
a law requiring officers to record both traffic and pedestrian stops.

In North Carolina, mounds of traffic-stop data lay dormant for a 
decade before academics like Frank R. Baumgartner, a University of 
North Carolina political science professor, began sifting through the 
statistics for evidence of bias in 2011. The Southern Coalition for 
Social Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Durham, has used 
the patterns of racial disparities to bolster demands for 
restrictions on searches and other changes.

Chief Scott, who assumed his post seven months ago, said he was 
withholding judgment until his own staff analyzed his department's data.

"We are not afraid to ask these questions," he said. But so far, he 
added, "I don't believe there is an underlying, systemic issue" of 
racial profiling.

Analyzing the Stops

Greensboro has long cherished its reputation as a Southern 
progressive standout. This was the first Southern city to pledge to 
integrate its schools after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in 
Brown v. Board of Education, although it was among the last to 
actually do so. And when four black freshmen from North Carolina A&T 
State University occupied the orange and green stools at Woolworth's 
whites-only lunch counter in 1960, Greensboro midwifed a sit-in 
movement that spread through the South.

But this is also where hundreds of National Guardsmen suppressed 
black student protesters in 1969 and where, a decade later, five 
protesters were murdered at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally conspicuously 
devoid of police protection.

And it was here, in 2009, that 39 minority police officers accused 
their own department of racial bias in a lawsuit that the city spent 
nearly $1.3 million fighting before agreeing to settle for $500,000. 
In a city that is 48 percent white, 75 percent of Greensboro's force 
of 684 sworn officers remains white.

The Rev. Nelson Johnson, a civil rights leader here since the 1960s, 
contends that like Greensboro as a whole, the Police Department "has 
a liberal veneer but a reactionary underbelly." An activist group he 
heads recently established a citizens' board to hear complaints about 
the police, arguing that official investigations too often are shams.

"This is not about one officer," Mr. Johnson said at a recent meeting 
about police behavior at the Beloved Community Center. "This is about 
a culture, a deeply saturated culture that reflects itself in double 
standards."

The Times analyzed tens of thousands of traffic stops made by 
hundreds of officers since 2010. Although blacks made up 39 percent 
of Greensboro's driving-age population, they constituted 54 percent 
of the drivers pulled over.

While factors like out-of-town drivers can alter the racial 
composition of a city's motorists, "if the difference is that big, it 
does give you pause," Dr. McDevitt of Northeastern University said.

Most black Greensboro drivers were stopped for regulatory or 
equipment violations, infractions that officers have the discretion 
to ignore. And black motorists who were stopped were let go with no 
police action - not even a warning - more often than were whites. 
Criminal justice experts say that raises questions about why they 
were pulled over at all and can indicate racial profiling.

In the past decade, officers reported using force during traffic 
stops only about once a month. The vast majority of the subjects were 
black, and most had put up resistance. Still, if a motorist was 
black, the odds were greater that officers would use force even in 
cases in which they did not first encounter resistance. Police 
officials suggested that could be because more black motorists tried to flee.

In an interview, Chief Scott said that overall, the statistics 
reflected sound crime-fighting strategies, not bias. They have 
produced record-low burglary rates, and most citizens welcome the 
effort, he said.

Deborah Lamm Weisel, an assistant professor of criminal justice at 
North Carolina Central University in Durham, said the best policing 
practices "involve officers making proactive contacts with citizens, 
and traffic stops are the main way they do that."

But many criminal justice experts contend that the racial 
consequences of that strategy far outweigh its benefits - if, indeed, 
there are any.

"This is what people have been complaining about across the nation," 
said Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at the John Jay College of 
Criminal Justice in New York. "It means whites are 'getting away' 
with very low-level offenses, while people who are poor or people of 
color are suffering consequences."

"It amounts to harassment," she said. "And police cannot demonstrate 
that it is creating better public safety." To the contrary, she 
added, it makes minority citizens less likely to help the police 
prevent and solve crimes.

That critique is ascendant in Fayetteville, about two hours by car 
from Greensboro. Fayetteville is three-fourths as big but equally 
diverse: Forty-six percent of its 204,000 residents are white, and 42 
percent are black. More than three years ago, an uproar over reports 
that black drivers were disproportionately stopped and searched led 
to the departure of the police chief and city manager.

The new chief, Harold Medlock, who was appointed in January 2013, is 
overhauling the department. Like Chief Scott of Greensboro, he 
deploys more officers in high-crime areas and faces constant demands 
from citizens to assign even more. But, Chief Medlock said, "they are 
not asking for more traffic stops."

He said he had told his officers to focus on drivers who speed, drive 
drunk or ignore traffic lights and stop signs - the violations that 
cost lives. Because officers typically cannot see who commits a 
moving violation like speeding, he said, it also "tends to eliminate 
the disparity in who is being stopped."

Using dashboard videos, Chief Medlock said, the department also 
pushed out two officers who were accused of singling out black 
motorists. At his request, the Justice Department is conducting a 
review of his department's practices.

Traffic data show the impact of Fayetteville's shift. In the three 
years before Chief Medlock arrived, slightly more than one-third of 
the black motorists who were stopped had committed a moving 
violation. The police today are still more likely to pull over blacks 
than whites. But so far this year, nearly two-thirds of them were 
stopped for a moving violation, nearly the same proportion as white motorists.

Closing a Gap

Fayetteville, N.C., drastically cut consent searches and largely 
eliminated the racial gap in search rates. Greensboro's searches have 
dropped as well, but blacks are still far more likely to be searched.

"Chief Medlock is godsent to Fayetteville," said Mark Rowden, the 
pastor of Savannah Missionary Baptist Church. "There was a lot of 
distrust between African-Americans and the police. That has turned around."

Not everyone is cheering. This month, Chief Medlock, who is white, 
found a racist flyer in his front yard that he regarded as a personal 
threat. On the back was an application for the Ku Klux Klan.

Searches and 'Hits'

In a certain percentage of traffic stops, the officer's motivation is 
not to write a traffic ticket but to search for signs of crime. An 
officer, however, cannot stop a motorist without evidence of a 
traffic violation or probable cause to suspect a crime.

Yet traffic codes are so minutely drawn that virtually every driver 
will break some rule within a few blocks, experts say. "The traffic 
code is the best friend of the police officer," said David A. Harris, 
a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies police behavior 
and search-and-seizure law.

When a Greensboro officer pulled over Keith Maryland and Jasmine 
McRae, who are black, in Mr. Maryland's burgundy Nissan early one 
evening in March, even that vast authority was exceeded, claimed Mr. 
Maryland's lawyer, Graham Holt.

In an interview, Mr. Maryland said Officer Christopher Cline had told 
him that his registration had expired, although it was clearly valid 
for 15 more days. The officer then said Ms. McRae, sitting in the 
back seat, "looked like someone" and asked to search her purse. 
Officers do not have to tell drivers or their passengers that they 
have the right to refuse, and like the vast majority of people, Ms. 
McRae agreed. The officer found a small amount of marijuana and 
several grams of cocaine and arrested her.

Mr. Holt said the stop was illegal because there was no traffic 
infraction. And in fact, a police corporal summoned Mr. Maryland to 
the station the next day and scrawled VOID across the ticket for an 
expired registration.

But the department and a city review board still found that the 
officer had acted lawfully. And Ms. McRae ended up pleading guilty to 
a misdemeanor charge of marijuana possession. She was sentenced to 
probation, incurring hundreds of dollars in fees.

Police officials would call Ms. McRae's search a successful "hit." 
But most consent searches in Greensboro are not, especially when a 
stopped vehicle's driver is black. Since 2010, officers searched 
blacks more than twice as often but found contraband only 21 percent 
of the time, compared with 27 percent of the time with whites.

The same gap prevailed when officers cited probable cause to search 
without permission. Officers searched blacks at more than twice the 
rate of whites, but found contraband only 52 percent of the time, 
compared with 62 percent of the time when the driver was white.

If those statistics are true, Chief Scott said, "we need to figure 
out how we can better serve our community in a fairer way."

Fayetteville officials believe that they have an answer. Faced with 
similar data, the City Council required officers in 2012 to obtain 
written permission for consent searches - a requirement endorsed this 
year by a White House task force on policing. Since then, the number 
of consent searches has plummeted to about one a week. Probable-cause 
searches dropped by more than half.

There is a downside, Chief Medlock acknowledged. Fewer weapons are 
being confiscated. But because consent searches seldom turned up much 
contraband anyway, he said, the losses are minimal.

A Catchall Charge

Carlyle Phillips said he had no trouble with the police when he was 
growing up in New Jersey. And he has had none in Maryland, where he 
now lives. But as a student at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, he 
said, he had one run-in after another. And he said he saw how routine 
traffic stops can become a springboard into a criminal justice system 
that can be hard to escape.

As a college junior in January 2010, Mr. Phillips said, he was pulled 
over in a predominantly white section of Greensboro for failing to 
wear his seatbelt - even though, he insisted, he was buckled in. He 
said he neither used drugs nor had had any with him. But that day, he 
said, he watched as the officer searching his car planted a plastic 
bag in it, then claimed it was evidence of drug use.

Mr. Phillips was charged with possession of less than half an ounce 
of marijuana, joining a long list of Greensboro blacks charged only 
with that offense since 2009. Five times as many blacks as whites 
were arrested on that charge, despite evidence whites use marijuana 
about as often.

Mr. Phillips hired a lawyer, and a judge dismissed the charge. But 
nine months later, another traffic stop bore more serious consequences.

As Mr. Phillips and another black student, Gian Spells, drove through 
downtown one night, they said, a police officer pulled alongside, 
looked at them, then dropped behind and flashed his lights.

"You cut me off," Mr. Spells said Sgt. Thomas Long had told him, 
according to a complaint the students later filed alleging racial 
profiling. "Clearly, you've had too much to drink."

Mr. Spells said he had not had any alcohol and asked for a test. 
Instead, the officer ordered him out of the car - a command within 
his authority. When Mr. Spells refused, the officer threatened him 
with pepper spray. Worried he might be framed again, Mr. Phillips 
said, he raised his hands in the air and told a second officer that 
he wanted to remain in his seat, only to be threatened with a Taser.

The students spent the night in jail, apparently because the officers 
said they were intoxicated. But they were never charged with 
drunkenness or reckless driving. They were charged only with 
resisting, obstructing or delaying an officer, or R.D.O., in police 
parlance. Since 2009, the Greensboro police have filed that charge - 
and no other - against 836 blacks but only 209 whites.

A judge eventually dismissed their cases. But in the meantime, Mr. 
Phillips said, a job offer was thrown into limbo when a background 
check turned up the pending criminal charge.

"That was probably one of the hardest things I had to face," said Mr. 
Phillips, now 27, who was eventually hired. "Maybe missing out on a 
great opportunity because some police officer takes offense at something."

The students' complaint of racial profiling was rejected. To this 
day, Mr. Phillips said, he does not understand why he and his friend 
were arrested. But Lewis Pitts, a well-known retired civil rights 
lawyer in Greensboro, sees no mystery.

If a black motorist "does anything but be completely submissive and 
cower, then you get the classic countercharge by the officer that 
there was resistance, or disorderly conduct or public intoxication," 
Mr. Pitts said. "Then they end up in jail."

In Fayetteville, Chief Medlock said he had instructed his officers to 
avoid resisting-an-officer charges unless some more serious offense 
also occurred. "I tell my folks, if that's all you have, don't charge 
somebody. Find a way to move them on down the road," he said.

Through a police spokeswoman, the Greensboro officers named in this 
article, all of whom are white, declined to comment. And partly 
because North Carolina law treats complaints against police officers 
as confidential personnel matters, accounts like Mr. Phillips's 
remain one-sided. Two years ago, Greensboro equipped all of its 
officers with body cameras and required them to film any searches. 
But those videotapes are confidential, too.

Chief Scott said he believed that if the state allowed the police to 
share them, at least with the citizens involved in the encounters, it 
would help dispel suspicions of racial profiling. "I am in favor of 
more transparency," he said. "Numbers don't say it all."

His department is striving hard to improve police practices, he said. 
It is trying harder to recruit minority officers, discouraging the 
use of Tasers, bolstering training in unbiased policing practices, he 
said, and making sure every credible complaint is investigated.

By that last measure, police officials point out, most citizens seem 
satisfied. Greensboro averages about 300,000 calls for police 
assistance every year. Only 64 people filed complaints in 2014. The 
department's own investigators deemed about two-thirds of the 
allegations without merit. Most complaints were about rudeness; only 
five concerned bias.

'I Get a Cold Chill'

Marie Robinson, 60, and James Fields, 52, are skeptical of that 
picture. Their run-in with two Greensboro officers ended with them 
offering an apology. But in fact, they said, they were owed one.

Early one afternoon in April 2013, they were sitting in Miss 
Robinson's black Honda Accord in front of Mr. Fields's house because 
Miss Robinson, who has diabetes, had a plunge in her blood sugar 
level, a recurrent problem that often causes her to lose 
consciousness. Mr. Fields said he had just brought her some apple 
juice from his kitchen when Officer Jesse Hillis approached and 
demanded to know what they were doing.

Mr. Fields said that he had explained, but that the officer had 
countered: "I think you are a drug dealer and she is a prostitute." 
Then he ordered him out of the car and pushed him against it, he said.

"What is your problem?" Mr. Fields said he had demanded, turning 
toward the officer. "Why are you stereotyping a black man?" He ended 
up facedown on the pavement, handcuffed.

Miss Robinson said she had staggered faint-headed from the car, only 
to be thrown back in, hitting her head. "I don't care," she said 
Officer Justin Kivette had told her. "You don't have a sign on you 
saying you're diabetic." For more than 90 minutes, Mr. Fields said, 
the officers refused to summon a paramedic.

The two were charged with resisting an officer, although both insist 
that they offered no resistance. When she asked why she was being 
charged, Miss Robinson said, one officer pointed to his partner and 
said, "How about you hit him?" Mr. Fields also was charged with 
assaulting a public officer.

For eight months while the charges were pending, Mr. Fields was 
suspended from his job as a department supervisor at the local 
Walmart. He fell behind in his rent and mowed lawns to make ends 
meet. Miss Robinson, whose previous brushes with the law consisted of 
two minor traffic tickets, said the whole experience "kind of took 
the life out of me."

Mayor Vaughan, who is also diabetic, discussed the episode with Miss 
Robinson at a community meeting. "I felt she was very believable," 
she said. But police officials apparently did not.

The department not only rejected all allegations in the complaint 
that she and Mr. Fields filed, they said, but the complaint seemed to 
backfire. Every night for a month after they filed it, Mr. Fields 
said, a patrol car parked outside his house.

Desperate to reclaim his job, Mr. Fields said, he agreed to write a 
letter apologizing to both officers. His charges were dismissed, as 
were those against Miss Robinson, who wrote a similar letter.

"I can't tell you how hard it was for me to stand up in court and 
apologize to them," Mr. Fields said. "I am still very much upset. I 
almost lost everything I had because two police officers stepped out of line."

"Every time I see a police officer, I get a cold chill," he said. 
"Even if I needed one, I wouldn't call one."

Rufus Scales, who landed in a hospital emergency room after being 
dragged from his pickup during his 2013 traffic stop, said he shared 
that sentiment. The steps he and his brother took to deal with it 
made their latest encounter with the police, in August 2014, a vivid 
illustration of why that mistrust exists.

One summer afternoon last year, the two men were walking down the 
residential street where their grandmother lives when a white officer 
passed them in his cruiser.

"Get out of the street, you morons," they said the officer, Travis 
Cole, had yelled at them, although the street has no sidewalks. When 
the officer asked for their IDs, Rufus Scales said, he responded with 
a curse word. Officer Cole then forced him to the ground and 
handcuffed him, he said.

"You can't come out here running your mouth and cursing out in the 
middle of the street," the officer lectured.

Both men were arrested on charges that they had impeded traffic on 
the deserted street. Rufus Scales was also charged with being 
disorderly and drunk, although, he said, he was neither.

This encounter differed from the traffic stop in one crucial respect: 
Devin Scales pulled from his pocket his newly purchased hand-held 
camera, recorded the episode and posted the video on Facebook.

After the brothers filed a complaint with the police, a prosecutor 
dropped all the charges. Officer Cole was suspended for two days. The 
city manager apologized.

As Devin Scales wrote in the Facebook posting, which he said had 
drawn 10,000 "likes": "This wasn't the first time."

Sharon LaFraniere reported from Greensboro, and Andrew W. Lehren from 
New York. Susan Beachy contributed research.
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