Black Men May Have Valid Reason To Run From Police, State's Highest Court Rules

BOSTON, MA — Massachusetts' highest court this week threw out a gun conviction against a black man, ruling he was stopped without sufficient cause and that his decision to run from officers should not be automatically held against him, given evidence of widespread racial profiling.

The precedent set by that second finding could have significant repercussions. In running from a police officer, the State Supreme Judicial Court ruling said, a black man "might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity."

"Given this reality for black males in the city of Boston," the ruling declared, "a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus."

The ruling hinges on Boston police data and a 2014 American Civil Liberties Union report that found blacks were disproportionately stopped by the city's police, as WBUR reports. Boston Police have previously disputed that ACLU report and its interpretation of the data, an assertion Police Commissioner William Evans repeated before a press conference Tuesday, adding that he was "disappointed" in the high court's decision.

The ruling was spurred by a 2011 case against a Boston man named Jimmy Warren, recounted in the SJC's ruling. According to that summary:

An officer patrolling Boston's Roxbury neighborhood approached two men, including Warren, who he believed matched a fellow officer's description of suspects in a recent break-in. When the officer approached the men, saying, "Hey fellas," Warren turned and ran. The officer ordered him to stop, and saw him "clutching the right side of his pants," which the officer thought suggested he was carrying a gun with a holster. He lost sight of Warren during the chase, before catching up to him in a neighborhood yard and ordering him to show his hands and "get down." Police found no contraband on Warren at that time, but did find a loaded gun inside the home's fenced-in front yard. When asked, Warren said he did not have a license to carry.

Warren fought the resulting gun conviction up until the SJC decision Tuesday.

In addition to its finding that a black man's decision to flee police does not inherently imply guilt, the SJC found that police were working off "far too little information" to conclude that Warren was the suspect police sought.

"... police were handicapped from the start with only a vague description of the perpetrators," the SJC ruling states. "Until the point when (the officer) seized the defendant, the investigation failed to transform the defendant from a random black male in dark clothing traveling the streets of Roxbury on a cold December night into a suspect in the crime of breaking and entering."

The SJC concludes, "Viewing the relevant factors in totality, we cannot say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

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