TO BE EQUAL 		                                  COLUMN 48


Stop Police Racial Profiling 

By Hugh B. Price   
President 
National Urban League

	 
"When I see cops today, I don't feel like I'm protected.  I'm
thinking, 'Oh, shoot, are they gonna pull me over, are they gonna stop
me?'  That's my reaction.  I do not feel safe around cops."

So said a black, thirty-something father and financial services
executive that David A. Harris, a professor at the University of
Toledo School of Law and expert on police racial profiling, cited in
his recent examination of this pernicious practice in the National
Urban League League's scholarly journal, The State of Black America
2000.

I thought of the words of this middle-class African American last
week.  He has the kind of "profile" that would lead one to believe
he'd be solidly pro-police: he's law-abiding, and focused on doing
well for himself and his family; clearly the kind of person who's been
successful at pursuing the American Dream.

But he knows all too well that in the eyes of many police officers,
the color of his skin is the only "justification" they need to stop
him on any pretext, or none at all.

What provoked my remembrance of this man's words was the release by
New Jersey state officials of more than 90,000 pages of internal
documents.  Those records leave no doubt that the New Jersey State
Police for more than a decade engaged in widespread racial profiling:
stopping African Americans and Hispanic Americans "on suspicion"
primarily or solely because of their race or ethnicity.

According to the state records, at least eight of every ten automobile
searches state troopers carried out on the New Jersey Turnpike during
that period were of vehicles driven by blacks or Hispanics.

That amounts to thousands upon thousands of people whose vehicles were
pulled over and who were made to sit or stand by the side of the road
while state troopers, with their car alarm lights flashing, questioned
them and searched their belongings.

Some law enforcement officials and their supporters continue to claim
that the police practice is not based on race, but on those "likely"
to be up to criminal misconduct.

But, in fact, the weight of the statistics from the New Jersey
stops-and from other states and cities where this occurs-shows this to
be an empty rationalization for misbehavior.

In New Jersey, the state records say that contraband was found in 30
percent of the searches-which means that 70 percent of the searches
turned up nothing improper.

John Farmer, the state's new Attorney General, who ordered the release
of the documents, said that "The effect of this kind of ratio over 10
years is devastating.  This may have been effective in law enforcement
terms, but as social policy it was a disaster."

Well, that ratio doesn't constitute good policing from where I stand.

In fact, it has the same "smell" of abridging fundamental individual
freedoms as the U.S. Supreme Court found last week in declaring
unconstitutional roadblocks the city of Indianapolis, Indiana at
various times in 1998 to search vehicles for drugs.

The Court said this policy violated the Fourth Amendment guarantee
against searches and seizures that aren't based on a suspicion of
individual wrongdoing.

But John Farmer, New Jersey's Attorney General, is right in saying
that racial profiling does have a devastating social impact.

That impact cuts three ways.

One is the corruption of the government's responsibility to protect
the law-abiding: racial profiling is police preying on the law-abiding
in the hope of catching a few criminals.

The second and third impacts Prof. Harris poignantly described as both
the cost to the individuals (and those who know them) who were
victimized by the police-their loss of trust in law enforcement-and as
the severe damage done to the general fabric of the society.  He
stated:

"Few who have spoken to African Americans about these experiences will
doubt that they are wounding, embarrassing and traumatizing to those
who endure them.  But ... the significance of racial profiling is
larger than the sum of individual experiences.  Profiling is an
example-both symbol and symptom-of all of the most difficult issues
our nation now faces at the crossroads of race and criminal justice."

48 TBE 12/1/2000 TO BE EQUAL 120 Wall Street, NY, NY 10005