Court rules that black men running from Boston police shouldn't be seen as suspicious

In dismissing a gun crime conviction stemming from a charge in 2011, the highest court in Massachusetts may have set a huge precedent for encounters between black men and police.

On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that black men often have good reason to run away from police when they have not committed a crime, and that police shouldn't view running as an indicator that a person is suspicious.

The ruling stems from the Dec. 18, 2011 arrest of Jimmy Warren in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Warren and another man were walking close to a park when an officer walked up to them. They both took off, and Warren was caught, arrested, and charged with unlawful possession of a firearm after police found an unlicensed gun in a nearby yard.

He was later convicted, but as of Tuesday, that conviction is no more.

In its ruling, the court first found that police had no reason to stop Warren or the person with whom he was walking.

Officers were looking into a burglary in the area, and only had vague descriptions of clothing with which to identify potential suspects. The court found that this provided officers with no way "to distinguish the defendant from any other black male wearing dark clothes and a 'hoodie' in Roxbury."

Then, citing 2014 ACLU data which found that 63 percent of Boston police stops involved black people even though they made up just 24 percent of the city's population, the court ruled that black people may well have a reason to run from police that has nothing to do with crime.

"We do not eliminate flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion analysis whenever a black male is the subject of an investigatory stop. However, in such circumstances, flight is not necessarily probative of a suspect's state of mind or consciousness of guilt. Rather, the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO [Field Interrogation and Observation] encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, 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, a judge should, in appropriate cases, consider the report's findings in weighing flight as a factor in the reasonable suspicion calculus."

In April 2015, a black Baltimore resident named Freddie Gray was fatally injured in police custody when police arrested him following a chase that occurred even though Gray had not committed a crime.

Earlier this month, an independent examiner determined that 13-year-old Tyre King was likely running from a police officer in Columbus, Ohio, when the officer fatally shot him.

“The reason that’s significant is that all the time in police-civilian encounters, there are disputes about what is suspicious and what is not suspicious," ACLU Massachusetts Legal Director Matthew Segal told The Grio. "So this is an opinion that looks at those encounters through the eyes of a black man who might justifiably be concerned that he will be the victim of profiling.”