BRATENAHL, Ohio — Bratenahl Police have changed how they record race on traffic stops.
“It wasn’t until your story came out in conjunction with the Marshall Project in November of last year that we really started looking at it with a fine-toothed comb,” Police Chief Chuck LoBello said.
The News 5 and Marshall Project-Cleveland collaboration showed how the village tickets mostly Black drivers from neighboring Cleveland.
Watch our investigation from November with The Marshall Project below:
RELATED: How a wealthy Cleveland suburb profits from ticketing Black drivers
Chief LoBello says if you break the law while driving in Bratenahl, you’ll get a ticket.
When we looked closely at the traffic stop numbers, it appears there’s improvement in recording who they stop.
It’s old-fashioned but more reliable, said Chief Chuck LoBello about the department now requiring his officers to hand-write daily traffic logs.
"It's a little bit time intensive, but it's definitely worth it for the end goal, which is to get accurate data," LoBello said.
The change came on Feb. 8, more than two months after the News 5 / Marshall Project collaboration about Bratenahl’s ticketing practices.
"What we discovered was that the data we had been relying on since the fall of 2020 was inaccurate,” LoBello said.
We found from January 2020 to last September, Bratenahl police either cited or warned more than 4,000 people.
Race was listed in just over 2,200 cases, and of those, 63% of those stopped by police were Black. In 45% of the stops, race was not listed.
"As far as the race, 60% of the citations going to African Americans, while I admit looking at the numbers, it doesn't look — it doesn't look like it bodes well for the police department,” LoBello said.
New Bratenahl traffic stop data from January to March still shows more Black drivers were ticketed.
But race is being recorded more frequently. In February, race was still left blank 15% of the time, but race was included in every traffic stop so far in March.
LoBello says he takes into account that the zip code the village shares with Cleveland is mostly Black.
"It's got nothing to do with targeting, it's got nothing to do with biased policing it's just we — when I say we, I mean the women and men of the Bratenahl police department — deal with what comes to us,” LoBello said.
Handwritten traffic logs after each shift include the officer’s name, date, outcome, gender and race.
LoBello puts it all on spreadsheets, he said, to check accuracy.
"The old method involved several other steps and a computer process that was something they'd never done before," LoBello said. "This — they considered to be easy and there's no misinterpretation of it."
State Representative Juanita Brent wants to make racial data collection mandatory for all law enforcement.
"It allows us to really to see what our trends are right now. No one has that data to even say there is some type of bias when it comes to our police officers,” Brent said in December.
"And I'm all for that," LoBello said. "I am all for that. What I am not for, though, is putting the onus on police officers."
LoBello said if there is a mandate, the state needs to pitch in.
"If the state doesn't put it on a driver's license and it's not readily available to them without asking, I think it has the potential to turn already confrontational situations — let's be honest, traffic stops tend to be,” LoBello said.
News 5 Investigator Tara Morgan asked LoBello how he would change the public’s perception.
“You know that's an excellent question, Tara. I wish I had a simple answer for you. I don't,” LoBello said.
LoBello says he’ll continue to have his officers hand-write traffic logs for as long as it takes.
He believes his officers do their jobs fairly and impartially, but it will also take meaningful interactions with people to change the perception.
Click here to read and watch the News 5 / Marshall Project investigation.
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