AUBURN — An analysis of local police enforcement data shows that more than 8 percent of police interactions with blacks occurred last year despite the city’s 2.5 percent black population, police Chief Phillip Crowell Jr. said Thursday.

But a deeper look at the numbers reveals an explanation that Crowell said helps show his officers are not engaged in racial profiling and, in fact, have made strides in reducing criminal contact by police with black residents in the city.

Crowell reacted to a USA Today analysis of uniform crime reporting data that suggested the city had a significantly higher rate of black arrests compared with non-blacks. He disputed their numbers.

He pointed to a January 2014 memorandum at his department that reviewed 2013 data that included physical arrests, criminal summonses and traffic citations.

“The 2013 statistics reflect that enforcement actions are not directly proportional to the demographics ratio of the city” for the black population, according to the memo from Deputy Chief Jason Moen.

The document goes on to explain that the city functions as a “service center” for the central Maine area, including large retail and industrial districts. The daily population swells to roughly double its residential size because of those factors, the memo says.

In 2013, local police engaged in 2,048 criminal enforcements, including arrests and summonses. Of those, more than half of the subjects were out-of-town residents; more than one-quarter were from Lewiston (where black people comprise 8.7 percent of the residential population.)

Of those total criminal enforcements last year, 205 involved blacks and, of those, more than 60 percent were not local residents. Moreover, nearly half were from Lewiston.

In fact, only 4 percent of local black residents were involved in criminal enforcement actions in the city last year, Moen wrote in his memo. That puts the police department’s enforcement actions “within the community’s demographics,” Moen wrote.

“The review shows that there were no patterns or trends to show that bias-based profiling exists with the agency,” he wrote.

Moen said no citizen complaints of profiling were reported to the local Police Department.

Crowell said that only a couple of complaints of bias have been lodged over the past seven years and, after investigation, none were founded.

Because the actual numbers of arrests involving the local black population is so small, it doesn’t take much to skew the percentages from year to year, Crowell said. It could be a traffic stop of a carload of people at the Auburn exit on the Maine Turnpike where drugs are found that bumps up the rate by a percentage point, he said.

In the case of the many shoplifting arrests and summonses seen in this city, local police often won’t make the initial contact but are brought in by store security. Those arrests and summonses end up in the overall data, he said.

Still, when Crowell saw that the percentage of black criminal enforcements jumped from 6 percent in 2011 to 8.4 percent in 2012 and 8.3 percent last year, rates that were higher than community demographics, he wanted to know why.

“We drilled down and did some further analysis,” he said.

His department doesn’t typically review residency statistics for the subjects his officers arrest, but he suspected that might play a role in the discrepancy between local population and total arrests.

Once the regional black population was factored into the local data, the racial percentages seen in the department’s enforcement actions began to make sense, Crowell said.

Other factors, such as educational opportunity, job rates and poverty further explain why a higher percentage of blacks have contact with police than non-black populations, he said.

“We have more people in poverty who are using drugs. We have more people in poverty that commit crimes,” he said. “And there are a lot of reasons why that is happening. And it’s those reasons we need to get to.”

For the past year and a half, the Maine Chiefs of Police Association has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine on this issue, Crowell said. That organization in a news release on Wednesday highlighted the USA Today analysis of Auburn’s black arrests.

One of the many efforts Crowell’s department has made along those lines has been to establish a Police Activities League Center in an area of the city where the highest minority youth population is found. The center offers activities and athletic programs for children in grades three through eight. In an added effort to steer the city’s youth population away from criminal activity, the school district and Police Department initiated a diversion program that directs suspended students to the PAL center aimed at reducing suspension rates, Crowell said.

While the USA Today analysis focused on Ferguson, Mo., where racial tensions were stoked by the shooting of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer, that city couldn’t be more different from Auburn, Crowell said. For one thing, the racial makeup of that Midwestern city has shifted dramatically since 1970, he said.

Crowell said he has reviewed his department’s enforcement actions every year since he became chief seven years ago to make sure his officers were acting appropriately.

“No administrator wants to be overseeing an agency that has those types of issues going on within their department,” he said.

Racial-profiling awareness training takes place at his department annually, he said. That includes policy review and best practices training through the U.S. Department of Justice.

“It comes down to the trust that you build within your community,” he said. “I’m out there in the community a lot and I feel that our community trusts us.”

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