T wo months have passed since Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri.
The resulting uproar heightened racial tension in communities across the nation, with a focus on the role of the police. Locally, the Don’t Shoot campaign, in which participants are photographed in a “hands up” pose to indicate innocence, was powerfully reproduced by the Black Student Movement in the Pit in August.
These problems are not new. Recent events have underscored a long-standing reality of police racial bias in this nation. Only now, the urgency of such actions is more palpable; it is clear people have had enough with the racial brutality of police forces. The time for just police policy is now.
Our neighbor on the other end of U.S. 15-501 is taking note. On Oct. 1, the Durham Police Department implemented a crucial change in property search policy. If the Chapel Hill Police Department is concerned with combating racial biases in its practices, it will follow suit.
Police officers in most cities only need a verbal affirmation to search your car or house. The new policy in Durham requires officers to obtain a signature of the person on a written consent form before doing the same search. With consent, a police officer does not need probable cause for a warrant for the search. Although it sounds like a minor technicality, written consent produces major changes.
In 2012, Fayetteville became the first city in North Carolina to implement a written consent policy. The effects have been dramatic. In the two years before the policy was implemented, 4,427 black passengers were searched during traffic stops. In the two years since, 2,891 male black passengers and drivers have been searched, a staggering 35 percent decline.
Less than 10 percent of Chapel Hill’s population is black, but black people have represented almost half of the people searched at traffic stops here since 2012.
