Arthur McFarland, a former municipal judge for Charleston who also broke barriers as part of the initial group of African American students who integrated Bishop England High in 1964, much in Charleston has changed while much has stayed the same.
Many decades after the walls of segregation fell, opening up pathways for increased opportunities for work, education and protection under the law for blacks in Charleston, Black people like McFarland are still impacted by the harmful remnants of Jim Crow.
Standing before roughly 100 people inside the St. Patrick Parish Hall on St. Philip Street, McFarland’s home church, the current attorney for the first time shared a riveting testimony about his 38 year-old son being pulled over nearly 20 times by Charleston police officers.
One night while driving a Jaguar in West Ashley, four officers pulled the man over due to a broken taillight (which was apparently fixed when McFarland’s son and the officers investigated the claim). The police searched the car but soon discovered he was the son of a municipal judge. They let the younger McFarland go without a ticket.
“The reason I’m involved in this work is because I don’t want my two grandsons to experience what my son has experienced, what my brothers have experienced, and what I have experienced over time,” McFarland said Sept. 30 at Racial Disparities in Charleston Forum hosted by the Charleston Area Justice Ministry.
The crowd at St. Patrick included people from CAJM’s 40 diverse congregations, college students and professors, medical professionals, pastors, activists, children, and members of a number of community organizations like the NAACP, Black Lives Matter and the E3 Foundation. The listened to presentations that included data uncovered by a racial bias audit of the Charleston Police Department in 2019, as well as potential solutions.
In 2019, the audit found that though Black people make up 30 percent of drivers, Black drivers are stopped more frequently than Whites, Blacks arrested at higher rates (516 Black vs. 114 white), and Back drivers are searched disproportionately although contraband is found more often in cars driven by Whites, among other disparities.
In 2023, an External Review Assessment report found that Charleston Police had, under former and now deceased Chief Luther Reynolds, made significant improvement in data collection to track disparities. However, the department made no progress on community engagement or transparency, and no progress on reducing racial disparities, the report found.
CPD responded to the ERA report with its own “final report” on Racial Bias Audit Implementation.
CAJM is concerned about this document for many reasons. For starters, billing the report as “final” is misleading because there are many steps that still need to be taken to reduce disparities. Also, the police have declined to engage directly with the community on this topic, and they refuse to acknowledge racial disparities as the reason for the audit in the first place, let alone take any meaningful steps to reduce disparities.
Several people in attendance at Monday’s event characterized CPD’s final report as “disgusting,” and a document that “perpetuates domination” and “leads to over anxiety for Black families.”
Using response forms from the event, questions will be crafted that will be presented to CPD at the upcoming Community Police Advisory Council meeting on Thursday, Oct. 3 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Charleston Police Department Headquarters Training Room, located at 180 Lockwood Dr., Charleston.
Additionally, CAJM is calling on the city to implement a policy to limit police frommaking non-safety related traffic stops.
