For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jude Schneider (310) 497-7312 or
Eric Rose (805) 624-0572
Los Angeles, October 20, 2008 – In response to the ACLU issuing a summary of the Ayres report on racial profiling, Los Angeles Police Protective League President Tim Sands has issued the following statement:
“As the old quote says, there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics.’ Dr. Ayres is trying to manipulate existing data to prove what 9,700 individual officers are thinking when they make traffic stops—which is an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles.
Dr. Ayres’ conclusions completely misread situations that are not nearly as black and white as he would want them to be. To begin with, the LAPD, mirroring the racial demographics of Los Angeles, is a majority minority department. There are more Hispanic officers than white officers.
Most traffic stops begin from a distance; the race of the suspects are unknown to the officers in pursuit. Dr. Ayres also tries to make a parallel between the race of the arresting officer and the race of the suspect, however, most officers work in pairs, and most of those pairs represent more than one race, so it is difficult to see how he can accurately come to a conclusion about how suspect and officer races match up. It seems that Dr. Ayres started with conclusions and then worked the data to fit.”
About the LAPPL: Formed in 1923, the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL) represents the more than 9,000 dedicated and professional sworn members of the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPPL serves to advance the interests of LAPD officers through legislative and legal advocacy, political action and education. The LAPPL can be found on the Web at www.LAPD.com
