The Driver: Roberto Santana-Park, with his wife Lorraine and their daughter Reina. When Roberto drove without his license, this “mere conversation” with police ended in a trip to the hospital and charges of drunk driving and assaulting an officer.
The Lobbyist: Jim Ludwick, founder of Oregonians for Immigration Reform, has dedicated his retirement to…
The Chief: Ron Louie, retired chief of the Hillsboro Police Department, was the state’s first official to collect data about the race and ethnicity of drivers his officers stopped. Other agencies, he said, were “frightened by the scrutiny of the numbers.”
The Historian: Darrell Millner, a professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, looks at the past and sees our present, from lash laws enforced by police, to the disparities we describe today. A podcast of the interview with Millner.
An analysis of more than a decade of court records in Oregon found that African-Americans paid $21.5 million more than whites for committing the same crimes. The finding proves there’s more than just police profiling at work in a system that treats African-Americans more harshly than whites, but police practices remain a factor in overcharging.
An Oregon reporting project analyzed 5.8 million criminal and violation cases comprising 8.4 million charges filed in the state’s 36 counties. It focused on 5.5 million charges filed between January 2005 and June 2016.
Native Americans who live on reservations consistently deal with distances and language barriers when it comes to voting. But experts who study Native American voting rights said recent changes to legal requirements and provisions for voting have exacerbated those problems.
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