Gainesville has a policing problem.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune published a blistering report of biased judicial sentencing patterns across the state in December 2016, focusing one section of their four-part investigation squarely on Gainesville.
The report explores the burden shouldered by east Gainesville in GPD’s war on drugs, finding that GPD patrols black neighborhoods in east Gainesville — stopping college-aged males for minor infractions like jaywalking or biking without lights and then busting them for marijuana possession — while leaving west Gainesville and UF’s campus largely unbothered. The result is young black men who appear before judges with much longer rap sheets, leading to harsher sentences than their white counterparts.
And there are plenty of white counterparts.
Several studies have shown that whites and blacks use drugs at equal rates, and many students on this campus know the frequency that fellow students use drugs like marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and LSD.
What’s more, white people outnumber black people in Gainesville almost 2-to-1 (making up 64.9 percent compared to 23 percent of Gainesville’s population, respectively), whites in poverty outnumber blacks in poverty by almost 2-to-1 (18.4 thousand to 11.7 thousand, respectively, according to city-data.com) and whites outnumber blacks on UF’s campus, where fewer than 4,000 of the 50,000 students are black.
If Gainesville residents were policed without bias, such differences would carry over into arrest data, with roughly two white people busted for every black person.
Instead, according to data collected by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for GPD arrests in 2014, 343 black people were busted for misdemeanor marijuana charges compared to 122 whites — that’s almost three black people for every one white person busted.
The effects of such policing practices are intuitive, if not obvious. In a city with as deeply racist a past as Gainesville ( the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported “a known Klan member worked for the county jail as recently as 2009”), disparate treatment by police only further entrenches rational community distrust.
So, what can be done?
To GPD’s credit, they’ve acknowledged this problem and, since 2012, have established several initiatives to address it. In a Facebook response to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s investigation, GPD emphasized their awareness, describing a new Youth and Community Services division, which includes a Disproportionate Minority Contact Initiative, entailing mentoring and job training programs for community members. Just last year, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch honored GPD Sgt. Audrey Mazzuca with a distinguished service award for her work combatting this problem.
These steps are positive and, according to GPD, are producing change.
However, decency and responsibility — which is what these programs amount to — will only go so far.
The war on drugs is a complicated one, and while race plays a role in who gets singled out for drug busts, many argue money motivates the busts in the first place.
“Drug enforcement justifies officer salaries,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune wrote in a report. “High arrest numbers help agencies apply for millions of dollars in federal grants. Forfeiture laws let police keep cars and cash seized from drug dealers.”
Officers therefore have economic incentive to crack down on drugs, and indirectly have incentive to crack down on the communities least likely to object to arrests and forfeitures with legal action.
Until we can incentivize officers economically to spread their attention more evenly among Gainesville’s people and problems, (perhaps redistributing forfeitures among non-police related public resources or urging federal representatives to alter the criteria for federal grants), we can expect this problem — and the racial inequity that accompanies it — to linger.
Champe Barton is a UF economics and psychology senior. His column appears on Tuesdays.
