BLACK RIDERS FACE STIFFEST TRANSIT PENALTY AT RATES MORE THAN SIX TIMES THAT OF WHITES

African-American transit users had long complained they were targeted for enforcement on trains and buses.

So, last year, at TriMet’s request, Portland State University’s Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute studied two years of enforcement data and found that fare inspectors and supervisors did not disproportionately charge African-American riders with skipping fares. 

However, that study did find that African-American riders were more likely than whites to be excluded from trains and buses. At the time, TriMet characterized the variances found in the PSU study as slight. And when the data are sliced one way, disparities were slight.

What the study did not include, however, was a thorough analysis of another common charge — one that Dean got: interfering with public transit, known as IPT.

Our analysis, which includes 10 years of state court data, shows that African-Americans have been charged with IPT at a rate up to 6.4 times the rate of white riders over the past decade.  

Multnomah County district attorney: Prosecutors studied three years of charges for interfering with public transit and found African-Americans were charged at least seven times more frequently than whites. Once the PSU study confirmed the higher rate of exclusion — often a precursor to being charged with interfering with public transit — local district attorneys stopped issuing the charge.

Unequal justice: Reporter Kate Willson, with support from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting and criminologist Mark G. Harmon, examined a decade’s worth of charges for interfering with public transit by race. The series found African-Americans had been charged with interfering with public transit at a rate of 6.4 times the rate of whites. 

All of the studies above used ridership data supplied by TriMet as its baseline for population demographics.

The Transit Police Division is run by the Portland Police Bureau but is closely tied to — and funded by — the transit agency and its mission is to discourage crime throughout the TriMet system.

Lee van der Voo

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