PROFILES IN WHAT?

"Racial profiling" means different things to different people, and at least
in some cases is clearly deplorable. But the new push to ban racial
profiling by Schenectady police raises a number of questions for which
there may not be satisfactory answers.

Police obviously should not be permitted to target people solely because of
their race. They should not be able to pull over a black driver on a rural
road for no reason, or for some spurious reason such as statistics that may
show blacks committing proportionately more crime than whites.

However, those police who pursued the criminal syndicate run by John Gotti
ended up investigating and arresting mostly Italian-Americans, and there's
nothing wrong with that. Similarly, people of a particular race or ethnic
group may wind up dominating aspects of the drug trade - e.g. the traffic
between New York City and Capital Region cities such as Schenectady - and
will get investigated and arrested in high numbers.

While Schenectady Police Chief Greg Kaczmarek was right to warn his
officers against racial profiling, the New York Civil Liberties Union
suggestion of how to enforce a ban is not helpful. Police do not need to be
wasting time compiling some sort of racial dossier regarding the people
they interact with. Furthermore, in an era of community policing in
high-crime, heavily minority neighborhoods, it is likely that a high
percentage of such interactions will involve members of minority groups -
which should not be problematic.

Racism has historically existed in many police departments, and needs to be
rooted out. But, in contemporary America, there is a tendency to find
racism when it isn't there, as in some denunciations of racial profiling.
Police officers use some form of "profiling" all the time in sizing up
situations: For example, two 75-year-old women from Schenectady chatting on
a street corner known for drug sales would draw less attention than two
19-year-old males from Brooklyn. There's nothing wrong with that, either.