Study: Blacks arrested disproportionately in Johnson County, Carmel

In Johnson County, black people are nearly nine times as likely to be arrested as people of other races — the highest racial disparity for arrests in Indiana.

In Carmel, blacks are more than six times as likely to be arrested as others.

Racial disparities that are less dramatic but still present hold true in dozens of police jurisdictions across Indiana, including many of the agencies around Indianapolis, according to a USA TODAY analysis of arrest records from 2011 and 2012. Similar disparities held true in departments across the United States.

In Indianapolis, blacks are three times more likely to be arrested than whites, despite comprising just above one-fourth of the population in the 2010 census.

What accounts for the disparities — educational and economic gaps that influence crime, or biased policing — isn't clear. But as America braces for a grand jury's decision in Ferguson, Mo., where an unarmed black teen was shot and killed this summer by a white police officer, the issue of how police interact with minorities, particularly blacks, is as thorny a topic as ever.

In Johnson County, where the black population is 1 percent, blacks were arrested by the Sheriff's Office at a rate of 311 per 1,000. Other races faced a rate of 35 arrests per 1,000. Sheriff Doug Cox said he was shocked by the numbers and, at first glance, questioned whether they were flawed.

Cox says he hasn't fielded a complaint about a racial incident with an officer in the four years he's been sheriff. When he was an investigator, Cox said, many of the burglary investigations led to suspects in Marion County, which he said may account for the disparity. "I certainly don't look at it as we are picking on the African-American community," he said.

Cox said the Sheriff's Office has no black officers on the streets.

The ratio was nearly as out of balance with the Carmel Police Department, which had the fifth-highest racial disparity in Indiana. In Carmel, blacks are arrested at a rate of 267 per 1,000. The rate for whites is 41 per 1,000.

Carmel police issued a statement Wednesday night saying the department "does not target individuals of any nationality, race or religion." It said the department doesn't agree with the analysis "unless you are assuming that all arrested in Carmel are residents, which is an incorrect assumption." The statement said a more accurate picture would look at the "daytime demographic."

Carmel's black population stands at 3 percent but, according to departmental statistics, blacks accounted for 16 percent and 18 percent of the department's arrests in 2011 and 2012, respectively. About 7 percent of the Carmel police force is black, said Lt. Joe Bickel.

Across the nation, less than 5 percent of the more than 3,500 police departments USA TODAY examined arrested black people at rates in line with or below those of other racial groups. In Indiana, there were only two. The Sullivan County Sheriff's Office, in southwestern Indiana, and Putnam County, just west of Indianapolis, had arrest rates for blacks lower than their portion of the population.

The USA TODAY review, which examined data that police departments report each year to the FBI, excluded smaller police agencies that serve areas with only a minute black population.

In more than 40 percent of the nation's police agencies studied, the disparity in arrests was higher even than in Ferguson, Mo., where the arrest rates of blacks are nearly three times those of whites. That was true in Indiana, too.

Among those departments with a higher racial disparity in arrests than Ferguson were Avon, Bloomington, Carmel, Fishers, Greenwood, Indianapolis, Johnson County, Kokomo, Lafayette, Speedway, Westfield and West Lafayette.

Greenwood Police Chief John Laut said he would like to know more about how the analysis was done, but he said Greenwood's black population of 2 percent is somewhat misleading. Each day, he said, thousands of people visit Greenwood Park Mall, many of them from outside the city and, as a whole, a more diverse population than the city itself.

Greenwood has no black police officers on its 56-member police force. But Laut said, based on his observations of how officers interact with the public, he doesn't think the department has a problem with racial bias. For one thing, he has had no race-related complaints since he took office in 2012.

Call Star reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @RbtKing.