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