GUILTY OF DRIVING WHILE BLACK

Last week, one of my younger brothers told me about something that happened
to him that really bothered him.

A couple of weekends ago, he and his wife decided to go to a reggae concert
at the CNE.

As my brother drove into the CNE grounds he encountered a huge lineup of
cars. He assumed the back-up was because of the number of people (almost all
of them black) going to the concert. It took him almost an hour to get to
the front of the line. Once there he realized the police were the ones
causing the delay.

They were stopping every car that entered the CNE grounds.

When they pulled my brother over they asked, "Do you own this car?" My
brother found the question offensive. He responded by giving the officer the
ownership and registration for his Nissan Maxima.

He then asked why they were stopping everyone. The officer told him that
this was something the police planned on doing at every major concert in the
city.

My brother asked: "Even at a Celine Dion concert?" The officer didn't reply.
Instead, he gave my brother back his papers and let him go. My brother and
his wife were so unsettled by the incident, they went home instead of going
to the concert.

What happened to them is nothing new. For years, young blacks in Toronto
have been saying they're over-policed.

Most of the time their stories fall on deaf ears, as was the case at Chief
Julian Fantino's recent meet-and-greet with Toronto's black community at the
Jamaican Canadian Association. The issue was raised at that meeting, but
Fantino gave it relatively short shrift.

In the U.S., the issue won't go away. It's called racial profiling. It first
came to the public's attention in 1977 when a report by the U.S. Department
of Justice revealed that police in Volusia County, near Orange County in
Florida, used race as a reason for stopping cars in order to search for
drugs.

The issue of racial profiling surfaced again in 1992 when Harvard Law
graduate and public defender Robert Wilkins filed a civil suit against the
Maryland Police Department. He and his family were returning home from a
funeral in Chicago when they were stopped by police and searched by
drug-sniffing dogs.

Wilkins sued, claiming police violated his civil rights. He said the only
thing he was guilty of was "driving while black" and his lawsuit made the
phrase famous.

As he was preparing for his trial, Wilkins obtained a police memo
specifically warning officers to be on the alert for "young African-American
males on I-68 in the early morning in rental cars." More than four years
after the incident, the police settled their lawsuit with Wilkins.

As a result of the national attention given to Wilkins' case and many
similar incidents around the U.S., last year the House of Representatives
passed the Traffic Stops Statistics Act. It's supposed to discourage police
from using racial profiling to stop and search vehicles.

The bill requires the U.S. Justice Department to conduct a study of routine
traffic stops by state and local police to determine why vehicles are being
stopped.

But nearly two years after Wilkins' settlement, "driving while black" was
apparently still a crime in Maryland.

Police statistics showed that although blacks only made up 14% of drivers,
they represented 73% of drivers stopped on I-95 between Baltimore and
Delaware.

Many young blacks in Toronto feel that "driving while black" is considered a
crime here too - especially if you have a nice car. All racial profiling
does is anger and alienate law-abiding citizens, like my brother, who get
treated as if they're criminals.

If Fantino's right and racial profiling isn't on the police agenda here, he
may want to share the news with some of his officers.