Why Racial Profiling Must Be
Brought to an End
By
Johnie H. Scott
(Wednesday, WAVE Newspapers, February 9, 2000)
If the
constitutional guarantee of equal protection means anything, it has to mean
that it is unacceptable for our citizens to be stopped and searched on account
of their race.
Those words of Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, are taken from his April 14,1999 statement introducing H.R. 118, the Traffic Stops Statistics Act to the 105th Meeting of the United States House of Representatives. The Act would require the collection of several categories of data on each traffic stop. This includes the race of the driver and whether or not a search was performed.
The Attorney General would then conduct a study analyzing the data, which would then be the first nationwide, statistically rigorous study of these practices. The idea behind H.R. 118, as explained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in its Special Report on Racial Profiling “was that if the study confirmed what people of color have experienced for decades, it would put to rest the idea that African Americans and other people of color are exaggerating isolated anecdotes into a social problem. Congress and other bodies might then begin to take concrete steps to channel police discretion more appropriately.”
Conyers explained his introductory remark by saying, “When we speak of the problem of police misconduct incur nation, our concerns are greatly aggravated by the fact that all of the high profile cases involve persons of color.”
He continued, “When a police officer in Pittsburgh kills a black motorist who had slowed down and peered through his side window while observing a drug arrest; when a 19-year-old black woman in Riverside is shot to death by a policeman in her car at a gas station, and when a West African immigrant is shot 41 times in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment by four police officers, certainly it is legitimate for us to ask whether there was racial profiling involved.”
The evidence Conyers drew upon in putting together this bill is compelling. He cited a study by the Orlando Sentinel which “found that 70 percent of the persons stopped on I-95 were African Americans, even though they made up less than 10 percent of the driver population. A court-ordered study in Maryland found that more than 70 percent of the drivers stopped on I-95 were African American though they made up only 17.5 percent of drivers, while another study in New Jersey found that minorities were nearly five times as likely as non-minorities to be stopped for traffic violations along that state’s turnpike.”
There is also considerable evidence that Hispanics and other minorities are being targeted by racial profiling. The Act passed in Congress in March 1998 by a unanimous vote and was then referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. That Committee never voted on the measure, nor did it hold any meetings. One year later, Conyers reintroduced the Traffic Stops Statistics Study Act (HR 1443) which was now sponsored in the Senate (S. 821) by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey, and Russell Feingold, D-Wisconsin.
Speaking on the Senate floor, Feingold said “…by and large, when minorities are stopped by law enforcement officers, they are not attorneys, and they may not know or assert all of their rights – they are scared and they are resentful.”
Feingold noted, “And rightly so, when they have been the victims of racial profiling. Is this the way we want to stop the flow of drugs in America? By randomly targeting racial and ethnic minorities who are doing nothing more suspicious than driving their cars?”
“Do we want law-abiding American citizens to feel as though they are living in a police state, scared and reluctant to travel in their cars for fear of being stopped and searched for no reason?”
We here in Los Angeles are being staggered everyday, it seems, by yet more revelations of widespread corruption in the ranks of our own law enforcement agencies. Many of these abuses have their roots in the racial profiling strategy first implemented in the early 1980s with Operation Pipeline – a tactic legalizing pretext stops in the so-called “War on Drugs” that, very quickly, degenerated into another front in more and more has taken on the apearance of an uneclared “War on African Americans and Other Poor People.”
A featured guest on ABC-TV’s Nightline program hosted by Ted Koppel was “Trial of the Century” prosecutor Christopher Darden. Darden said that to survive the traffic stops, he “learned the rules of the game years before…Don’t move. Don’t turn around. Don’t give some rookie an excuse to shoot you.” The prosecutor’s words raised no eyebrows in the Black Community listening to the show. His perspective is nothing new.
The ACLU asks some profound questions of everyone, questions that demand to be answered. “What happens, for example, when law enforcement embraces a tactic that is based on the systematic and transparent deception of overwhelmingly innocent people? And what happens when that tactic is employed primarily against people of color?”
In April 1999, then-President William Jefferson Clinton issued an Executive Order that called for federal law enforcement officials to collect data on the race and gender of the people they stop to questioner arrest. The President said,” While public confidence in the police has been growing steadily overall, people of color continue to have less confidence and less trust, and believe they are targeted for action.”
President Clinton continued, "We must stop the morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice of racial profiling. We all have an obligation to move beyond anecdotes to find out exactly who is being stopped and why.”
Most revealing was the President’s position of supporting the legislation before Congress (i.e., HR 1443, S. 821) that would provide funds for states to collect similar data, a move even then being resisted by law enforcement officials. On September 28,1999, California Gov. Gray Davis vetoed a bill by state Senator Kevin Murray, D-Culver City, that would have required the California Highway Patrol and major police and sheriff’s departments to record detailed information on their traffic enforcement activities including total stops, the number of arrests, warnings and citations, number of searches, and the reasons for the stops.
Davis said the bill could cost too much and place a heavy burden on police while adding there was “no evidence that this practice is taking place statewide requiring sweeping legislation that mandates state scrutiny of every local law enforcement agency in California.” That action was immediately criticized by the ACLU which described racial profiling “as the leading civil rights issue of the 1990s.”
The AmericanCivil Liberties Union has filed a class-action suit on behalf of the Maryland NAACP and charging that the Maryland Police uses discriminatory racial-profiling techniques in stopping drivers. The NAACP and the 11 plaintiffs in the suit seek monetary damages onbehalfof themselves and hundreds of minority motorists who have been arbitrarily stopped and searched by officers searching for drugs. The ACLU had earlier filed a federal suit against the CHP and the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, accusing both of racial profiling. In Los Angeles, Police Chief Bernard Parks had already said he opposed such a study while saying “his agency does not engage in racial profiling and need not study the issue.”
In a memo to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Sheriff Lee Baca stated he would not require his department to participate in a racial profiling study despite a formal request by the Board in November of 1999.
One of the great leaders of the 20th century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
I am concerned when one of my African American students at CSUN will say during classroom discussions, “When see cops, I don’t feel like I’m being served or protected. What goes through my mind is ‘O Lord, are they gonna pull me over? Are they gonna stop me again for nuthin’? Take me to jail? Shoot me? That’s the way it is. Unlike white people, I don’t feel safe when the cops are around.”
What bothers me even more are the heads nodding in agreement of other African Americans in the class, male and female, while this is being said. And my own awareness of the painful truth being spoken, wishing it were otherwise, that I could point to some signal of change, however faint or tiny.
(This article has been edited from the original “Not On My Watch” first published by the WAVE Newspapers and includes websites updating the original – JS)