BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — It’s a reality for Black men, women and children across America: the sight of a police officer in their community may induce feelings of fear rather than of safety.
A decadeslong history of mistrust between communities of color and law enforcement, passed from generation to generation, sits beneath the surface, coming to light with each new Black man, woman or child whose death involved an officer.
In Boynton Beach, the death of 13-year-old Stanley “SJ” Davis III, brought that distrust to the surface once more. Residents have since pointed to a long, deep-seated history of mistrust, and disconnect between the Black community and some police officers that is fueling a larger distrust for Boynton Beach police and those in power.
“My son will bring forth a lot of things that have been swept under the rug for far too long, that have been dismissed,” Shannon Thompson, Davis’ mother, said at the first commission meeting after her son died.
On Dec. 26, 2021, Davis pulled into a Chevron gas station to fill up his brand new dirt bike, a Christmas gift he received the day before. Shortly after paying for gas, Davis fled from the gas station as Boynton Beach Police Officer Mark Sohn trailed him. Davis ultimately lost control of the dirt bike, crashed and died.
The Florida Highway Patrol finished its investigation into the fatal crash on March 30. Investigators determined Davis was driving about 85 to 86 mph at the time of the crash, the traffic homicide report says. Sohn was driving about 79 to 80 mph. The speed limit in the area of the crash is 35 mph.
No charges will be filed against Sohn, the report says, “because the at-fault person expired as a result of the crash.”
At the heart of the distrust between communities of color and police is “community trauma” and a collective sense of fear or skepticism of police as they see people who look like themselves be mistreated, harmed or killed by police in the media, said Dr. Lorenzo Boyd, University of New Haven’s Stewart Professor in Criminal Justice and Community Policing.
The family has said fear of Sohn, who Davis knew, is what caused the teen to flee. Davis, an honor-roll student at Congress Middle School who loved the color red, Chick-fil-A and football, crashed his bike and died three minutes after the officer started the pursuit, the report says.
In the nearly four months since Davis’ death, Black residents have gathered at community memorial events, rallies and vigils and spoken at city commission meetings about their discontent with elected officials.
And the teen’s family, friends and supporters have become a collective voice speaking on behalf of other Black residents in Boynton Beach who have said they share the experience of being over policed, racially profiled and misunderstood, having their demands for accountability and justice discounted.
Pernell Davis, Davis’ uncle, said on a recent evening at a rally outside the police department that a 70-year-old resident thanked his family for speaking out publicly about some of their shared opinions about community policing.
“It’s because in the past, their kids have been policed terrible and they had no outlet and nobody to reach out to,” Pernell Davis said. “So now that we’re speaking on this, we may not get justice for her kid, but us getting justice is satisfying enough for her because people have to live through this.”
Nearly 3,000 people have signed a petition created by Davis’ mother, urging the city to terminate the officer who followed Davis. Some signed, they wrote, because they could envision their relative being in Davis’ shoes.
“This could’ve been my son, nephew or cousin,” wrote one signee.
“I too have an 11-year-old and think what if,” wrote another.
Others have had relatives who were in Davis’ shoes: Corye Readon, the father of Jayden Readon who died as a result of a high-speed pursuit involving Sohn, the same officer who followed Davis on Dec. 26, has talked at meetings. So has a daughter of Cyrus Deal, who crashed his car and died while fleeing the same officer.
Levels of ‘vicarious trauma’
Boyd, who is also a former 14-year deputy at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in Massachusetts, said there’s a generations-long history of negative relationships between police and communities of color, dating back to police departments sprouting from slave patrols and to the Jim Crow segregation era in the South.
“Communities of color have vicarious trauma. The things aren’t happening to them, but they’re witnessing people like them being harmed over and over and over again. ... They tend to recoil, and they go into survival mode. For a lot of communities of color, their level of survival is complete avoidance from the police,” Boyd said.
Florida International University recently completed a study on racial and social equity in Boynton Beach and presented findings to city officials in January. The study followed the revealing of a public mural in 2020 where the faces of two Black firefighters — the city’s first Black woman firefighter Latosha Clemens and former fire chief Glenn Joseph — were painted white.
Researchers during the study talked to residents about their thoughts on community policing. Some said they wanted to see a larger police presence. Others said “they want the police to ‘leave them alone.’”
“These comments are heard across communities all over the country and the different perceptions of the role and need for policing are dependent on the particular experiences of residents,” the study reads. “What influences these views is also the level of trust residents have in law enforcement with regards to their fairness and ability to prevent violence, protect lives and property, particularly in minority communities.”
That trust, Boyd said, is hard to build in communities of color without the necessary training for police officers to understand why it lacks to begin with.
Davis’ family and residents have said they are tired of having to speak out about injustices against Black people. Boyd has described that as “racial battle fatigue” in communities of color.
“If you’re tired of talking about race, how exhausting must it be to have to live it every single day? When society sees young urban Black males, they just automatically assume the worst, and people are tired of being thought of as the boogeyman or being thought of as perpetrators when there’s a lot of Black people just trying to lead their best Black lives but they’re forced to deal with police issues,” Boyd said.
And oftentimes, communities of color feel their demands for justice aren’t heard until protests or riots break out.
“We want to fix these issues before it gets to that,” Boyd said. “People go out and protest when they think their back’s against the wall, when they have no other recourse …”
Progress made, work to be done
Pastor Richard Dames, president of the Boynton Beach Coalition of Clergy and senior pastor at Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church, said there is a history of negative relationships between police and the Black community in Boynton Beach.
“There’s been a history well over 20 years that the way that District 2, the Black community, primarily Cherry Hill, has been policed to the point where residents were literally frightened, children were frightened. They would run away from the police,” Dames said.
He described his fellow pastors leaving church in luxury cars, being pulled over by officers without an inclination of why, aside from the color of their skin. He, too, has experienced what he feels is racial profiling by police in the community and said conversations Black parents have with their children are all-too-often focused on how to act when they encounter police officers.
“It’s that type of behavior that even the pastors have been subject to,” Dames said. “Rims on the car, music that’s playing, is that probable cause to pull them over? Did they change lanes without using their turn signal, or a car just looks like it’s a car that may have drugs in it or the driver may look suspicious?”
According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a Black person is five times more likely to be “stopped without just cause” than a white person.
“If you’re not a Black person, you don’t know what it means to have to tell a 13-year-old Black boy, 15-year-old Black boy or 9-year-old Black boy or teenager, ‘If you get pulled over, this is how you’ve got to behave,’” Dames said. “How is that serving and protecting?”
Dames said there has been notable improvements in the relationships between Boynton police and the Black community since Chief Michael Gregory, who is Black, took over nearly four years ago. Dames has participated in town hall meetings with Gregory and said the chief has been “willing to have a listening ear for the community.”
Gregory marched alongside residents in a Black Lives Matter protest after the murder of George Floyd. Dames said he felt that exemplified progress.
“We never had that before. That, I felt, was progress,” Dames said. “I think it meant something to the community, to have him there with us,” Dames said.
Despite the progress, there’s still work to be done, Dames said.
“We’re just not comfortable at a level yet to where the community trusts the police. We’re not there,” Dames said. “There’s a lot of work, and especially after this incident, there’s still a lot of work that has to be done to bridge the gap.”
‘Balance’ in police presence
Gregory and other police department leaders led a community meeting Thursday night that included a presentation on the department’s Internal Affairs procedures and community policing efforts, followed by a Q&A. About 20 people, including Davis’ relatives and outgoing Mayor Steven Grant, attended.
Bridging the gap between the community and police starts with efforts like Thursday’s meeting, said Gregory. He plans to hold similar town halls every other month.
“It will take time, it will take dialogue, it will take conversations, it will take understanding to build trust,” Gregory said at the meeting.
Gregory said he hopes to find a “balance” between residents who feel there is not enough police presence and others who feel over-policed.
“There are people in their homes who hear gunshots at night and don’t know where it’s coming from. They want to know, ‘Where are the police? Are they patrolling at night when they’re trying to get their sleep?’ They want us there,” Gregory told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “And then I hear the folks in this room who say, ‘Hey, the cops are always here. Why are they always policing our neighborhoods?’”
Black arrests increase
In Boynton Beach, Black residents are “over-represented in arrests” for nearly every kind of crime, which is “consistent with national findings,” the study says.
Just 31% of the city’s population identified as Black in 2020. But nearly 65% of the 535 people Boynton Beach officers arrested in 2020 were Black, which is a “significant increase” from 10 years earlier, the study found.
“The disparities are not unique to Palm Beach and Boynton Beach,” the study reads, citing a 2020 ABC News analysis that found Black people in 2018 were arrested at a rate five times more than white people.
And Black and minority children are more often arrested while non-Black and non-minority children are issued citations instead, according to the study. Seventy-seven juveniles were arrested in the 33435 ZIP code, which includes the historic Cherry Hill area, making up two-thirds of all the city’s juvenile arrests that year.
In that ZIP code, 38.8% of the population is Black, yet 84% of the minors who were arrested were Black.
The study also found that while overall crime rates have dropped in Boynton Beach since 2010, higher crime rates are found in the city’s economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, which in part explains the overrepresentation of some minorities in the criminal justice system, says the FIU racial equity study commissioned by the city.
Pernell Davis, Davis’ uncle, said he believes the way the city is policed is starkly divided between east and west of Interstate 95. District 2, on the east side, is predominantly Black residents.
“From moving to west of 95 we see the total different policing,” Pernell Davis said. “On the other side of Congress and things like that, you get a whole totally different police than we get, and a lot of these people looking at this and seeing us have these meetings and seeing us start voicing how we feel, it gives a lot of people in the community hope.”
His wife, Lolanda Byrd-Davis, said it often feels Black residents can’t seek protection from police officers when they “feel like you’re the target.”
“The city has had people come forward to speak on the injustices, to speak on the policing in the meetings prior to the death of my nephew, but it’s like it fell on deaf ears,” she said. “So now, this is like, the last straw. How many is it going to take for you to realize that it’s one-sided? For you to realize that there’s something really wrong with this area and how it’s being policed?”
Vice Mayor Woodrow Hay, who has represented District 2 since 2007, said there have been improvements in community policing during his tenure and is hopeful the city and police department can work together to continue “building that bridge,” starting with the citizens’ engagement committee.
Hay, who is Black, said some of the comments from constituents about their negative experiences with police officers resonate with him.
“I can identify with that. I would be pulled to the side for maybe a taillight out or maybe because they thought I ran a stop sign or crossed a line that really wasn’t there,” Hay said. “Those kinds of things are real.”
In Cherry Hill, there’s been a “lack of police relationships with the residents,” Hay said, adding it is one area in the city that comes with a negative stigma and may face more challenges than other areas in healing the disconnect with police.
Sharday Hunter, a 35-year-old aunt of Davis, said she feels the lack of trust the community has for police officers stems from what they often see as an “us versus them” mentality.
“The urban community feels unfairly targeted,” Hunter said. “Our pain is underreported. Our needs, our wants,” Hunter said.
Anishkah Newton, a lifelong District 2 resident, told the police chief she wants officers to get to know residents and residents get to know officers without being in a confrontational environment. When she sees an officer, Newton said, her reaction now is fear.
“Why are we afraid of the same people we’re supposed to call when we’re in trouble?” Newton said.
