Senior Athalia Lopez was walking with a group of friends by Pierce School on her way to buy frozen yogurt when she saw a police car. She assumed that it was going to pass them and keep on driving, but instead it stopped.

According to Lopez, the cops asked the group what they were doing and when they responded, the cops accused them of lying.

The two cops, who were white, said they had just received a call about two boys that bullied and stole bikes from kids. There were two boys in Lopez’s group, which was made up of Latino and black teenagers.

“Why is it that the group of colored kids gets accused of such a crime, when there’s tons of kids walking around since it’s right after school?” Lopez said.

After Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri over the summer, the nation’s ongoing conversation about racial profiling flared up. Does racial profiling affect high school students in Brookline?

Eighteen percent of the white students surveyed by The Sagamore said they have been stopped at least once by the Brookline police. Twenty-five percent of black or Latino students said the same.

Similarly, in 2011, 35.6 percent of field interviews by the Brookline police for individuals ages 13-17 were towards blacks and Latinos, according to the Brookline Police Department. Yet only 17 percent of students attending the high school are one of those two races.

“I was more upset because these were cops,” Lopez said. “They’re supposed to be above everything.They’re people of the law. They shouldn’t discriminate [against] the people they’re protecting. That’s wrong.”

Lopez also said that whenever she and her friends hang out at Hyde Park, the police always show up.

Social studies teacher Malcolm Cawthorne, who grew up in Brookline, said that he has had similar experiences. Once, when he was 11, a cop asked him, out of the group of friends he was with, if he had been lighting fire crackers at the Devotion park. When he said no, the cop asked him for some form of identification.

“It was really my first eye-opening [experience] with the Brookline police,” Cawthorne said. “Was I lighting fire crackers? I was out here playing sandlot football, or something. It was a bunch of kids just being goofy. That was really powerful to me.”

According to Cawthorne, these experiences can give kids a strong negative message.

“Kids start to see Brookline in a really negative light,” Cawthorne said. “This idea that Brookline is this terrible place because of these interactions, especially if the kids have never had another interaction with a Brookline Police Officer that’s positive. For the Brookline Police, one bad apple can spoil the bunch.”

Lieutenant Phillip Harrington, who is in charge of community service and public training for the Brookline Police Department, said the department has taken bias-based police training in the past.

Harrington said that it introduced the officers to the idea that everyone has their own biases and that they have to learn to adapt with them.

According to African American and Latino Scholars Program Director Christopher Vick, everyones judges each other; it is when one acts on those judgements that there is a problem.

“There’s profiling every day,” Vick said. “As teachers, we stereotype kids. People judge people. It happens. But I think the challenge is when you can’t divorce your judgements and let people actually prove themselves.”

Harrington said that the police department has ways of tracking officers. For example, he said that every officer’s traffic stops are recorded. It says whom they stopped and what their sex and race was.

“If they look at an officer’s data and they find that they’re pulling over a higher percentage [of a certain race or gender] than what the driving population is, they confront that officer,” Harrington said.

According to Harrington, the department found that the percentage of each race that police pull over during traffic stops reflects the people who are driving through town.

Cawthorne noted that the Brookline police have been very innovative and are working to fix any problems there may be.

Vick said that knowing how to interact with officers is crucial for young men of color.

“I think the vast majority of officers are awesome,” Vick said. “I think they do a great, dangerous job, and I give them total props. But because of the history of white supremacy in the country, I remember being taught when I was kid about how you deal with officers. Keep your hands visible, ‘Yes sir, yes ma’am.’”

As a rationale, he said, “I’d rather be taught then get shot in the face.”

According to the survey 52% of students of color said they have been told by their parents about how to interact with the police, while 32% of white students answered the same.

“[My parents] just tell us to do what they say and not to resist as much as possible,” sophomore Adrian Johnson, who identifies as black and Latino, said about interacting with the police.

Lopez said that her parents have always told her to be respectful to police and not say anything bad, especially if the policemen are white.

“Honestly, I think the cops here in Brookline, they need to get the facts straight before they stereotype and profile the African American and Latino kids,” Lopez said. “It’s unfair.”

Maya Margolis can be contacted at [email protected]