What 911 Calls Say About Racial Bias In Puget Sound

KIRKLAND, WA - What happened to Byron Ragland on Nov. 7 at a Kirkland Menchie's was, it turns out, pretty common.

Ragland was at the frozen yogurt shop working, supervising a visit between a mother and her son. But he was making the workers nervous. So the store's owner, Ramon Cruz, called 911 to report Ragland as an "unwanted subject." Police came and asked Ragland to leave the store, which he did.

We know what happened that day because Ragland told his story to the Seattle Times. It echoed multiple other outrageous incidents over the last: two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks because an employee thought they were suspicious; the "BBQ Becky" incident, where a white woman called 911 on a black family for barbecuing at a public park in Oakland, Calif; or when a woman called the police on two Native American teens on a tour of Colorado State University, telling the cops the teens looked like they didn't belong on the tour.

Local 911 call data show that "unwanted subject" calls are very common here, and racially imbalanced.

After the Menchie's incident, Patch requested all "unwanted subject" call data between January and November made in Kirkland and to the North East King County Regional Public Safety Communication Agency (NORCOM) 911 dispatch center. In the NORCOM service area - which includes Bellevue, Kirkland, Mercer Island, and smaller cities like Medina - more than 2,700 unwanted subject calls were made between January and November - an average of more than seven calls per day. Bellevue, by far, had the most unwanted calls with 1,859, followed by Kirkland, and then Mercer Island (61).

Kirkland police provided more detailed data showing the race of the "unwanted subjects" and the reason the call was made. Out of 674 unwanted subject calls made Jan. 1 to Nov. 20, 14 percent involved black people. But only about 1.2 percent of Kirkland residents are black, according to Census figures. Less than half the calls were to report white people who make up 77 percent of Kirkland’s population.

Those numbers could be higher, however, since some calls involved multiple black people, and 23 percent were for people whose race was unknown or not recorded by the 911 dispatcher.

Unwanted calls “weaponize” bias, according to civil rights experts, and sometimes end up with innocent people getting arrested, sometimes killed, like in the case of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

ACLU senior staff attorney Carl Takei says "unwanted" calls recall the Jim Crow era, when white people controlled where black and brown people could be in public.

“You want people to be making 911 calls, but alerting the police to legitimate suspicious behaviors as opposed to reflecting their individual biases of what a suspicious person looks like,” ACLU senior staff attorney Carl Takei says of “unwanted” calls.

In Kirkland, many of the calls were made to report specific, dangerous situations, but many are just made because a caller was simply uncomfortable addressing an issue with another person.

“There are so many times the officer doesn’t know what the situation is,” Kirkland police Lt. Rob Saloum said. “There are times when these turn into warrant arrest. But most, by far, is where there's some type of communication issue.”

The Kirkland 911 data showed callers reporting things like a man exposing himself at a coffee shop, or someone calling to report being followed after a road rage incident.

Many calls seemed to have a racial bias. A worker at a T-Mobile store called 911 in June to report that two black people were in the store and was worried they might steal something. One person called 911 when he saw a black man at the basketball court at his apartment complex. The caller told the dispatcher the black man wasn't a resident there.

Homeless people were constantly having 911 called on them. Many times, callers were reporting people sleeping on a sidewalk or in a vehicle, and in one instance a Dumpster. Sometimes the homeless people are doing nothing more than walking near a business.

(Patch asked NORCOM executive director Tom Orr to talk about “unwanted” calls, but he did not respond. We will update this story if we hear back.)

Want to see the 911 call data? Follow these links:

• NORCOM data Jan. 1, 2018 - Nov. 21, 2018
• Kirkland police data Jan. 1, 2018 - Nov. 20, 2018

Saloum said unwanted subject calls sometimes end in no action, or sometimes something positive. Officers recently responded to a report of an unclothed man in Lake Washington. It turned out he was homeless and trying to bathe. Police were able to get him to a shelter.

"He didn't have anywhere to go," Saloum said. "He was just trying to get clean."

The department has not changed any policies since the Menchie’s incident. Saloum said an internal investigation into the Kirkland officers’ behavior at Menchie's is ongoing. The results will dictate any changes, he said. City employees have undergone implicit bias training.

Takei said that all three sides of the 911 call - the caller, the dispatcher, and the police - have to work together to ensure the appropriate response. The 911 dispatcher should get as much information from a caller before dispatching police, he said.

“On the police end, they need to have appropriate policies and training to help them identify when they're being used to weaponize the biases of the 911 caller,” Takei said. “On the 911 side, dispatchers have to ask questions and be able to say to a caller, ‘What you've described doesn't sound like criminal activity, are you sure you want an officer dispatched?’”

Kirkland spokeswoman Kellie Stickney said that the city is beginning to do outreach in the community about bias. The city held a well-attended meeting on Nov. 27 with local residents and the groups KirklandSafe, Leadership Eastside, and Indivisible Kirkland to talk about what happened to Ragland.

The most important takeaway, Stickney said, was that there's a willingness among Kirkland residents to understand how the Menchie's incident occurred.

"Moving forward, I imagine the conversation won't be about when it’s right to call 911. It's going to be more a conversation asking people to look at our biases, to really analyze how our community thinks about issues surrounding race.

“The [Menchie’s] incident has brought to the attention of the city the need for a wider community dialogue.”

Caption: Byron Ragland addresses reporters on Nov. 20 in Kirkland. The police department there has apologized for an incident in which officers helped the owner of the Menchie's shop expel Ragland because employees said they felt uncomfortable. Ragland, who works as a court-appointed special advocate, was in the shop supervising a court-sanctioned outing between a mother and her son.

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson