“We are privileged to get out in front at this point before something seriously happens,” Springfield NAACP President Denise Williams said about the importance of the meeting Friday.
>>RELATED: NAACP questions Springfield patrol stops
Members from the Springfield post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Springfield Police Division, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office and the NAACP held a community forum Friday night at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, 34 W. Pleasant St.
The meeting comes on the heels of months of private meetings between NAACP leaders and law enforcement officials regarding complaints Williams received about state patrol stops in south-side Springfield neighborhoods.
“It was tedious because we had meeting on top of meeting on top of meeting to try to first bring us all on one accord and that was a little difficult because in the meetings we were disagreeing,” Williams said.
The complaints included allegations of racial profiling, both of the stops that were made by state troopers and of the areas they patrolled in Springfield, she said. Residents have also voiced concerns at Springfield City Commission and Clark County commission meetings in recent months.
The state patrol uses data on drunk driving crashes and other criminal activity such as drugs and weapons cases to determine where to focus their patrols when they come into the city, said Lt. Brian Aller, Springfield post commander of the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
“We work (an area of town) to try to deter crime — whether it be people that carry guns, have warrants, drive under suspension. Drive with dope, marijuana, heroin, things like that,” he said.
But race isn’t a factor when where troopers cruise, he said, and statistics show that.
Troopers pulled over more than 28,700 vehicles across Clark County last year, their data shows. Of those stops, more than 4,700 cases were in the city of Springfield.
And of the stops in Springfield, just more than 700 of them — or about 15 percent — were cases where African American men were pulled over.
“If there was a concern like that where our officers are racially biased or profiling, that’s something we take very, very, seriously,” Aller said.
The NAACP was happy with the outcome of the statistics, Williams said, but there are still issues to be worked out between law enforcement and the community.
“We want to change the mentality of the police forces and we want to change the mentality of our community and we want to come together,” Williams said.
One of the solutions Williams and Aller worked on together was the idea for a “checkpoint” where troopers could inform drivers of common problems they stop vehicles for, such as broken tail lights, illegally tinted windows or covered license plates.
The goal of every traffic stop, Aller said, isn’t to just give out tickets, but to weed out bad and dangerous drivers from the roads. That includes drugged or drunk drivers and people trafficking weapons and drugs in communities.
“We don’t want kids killed, we don’t want kids that are hit by drunk drivers — that’s why we’re here — it doesn’t matter your race,” he said.
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