COURT OVERLOOKS RACIAL OVERREACHING

Police officers in Oneonta, N.Y., took a sliver of a description and turned
the town's black male population into a company of humiliated, frightened
suspects.

Given the hue and cry over racial profiling - particularly the state
trooper-created "offense" of "driving while black" - it's a little strange
that so little has been made of the recent ruling of a federal appeals court
in New York.

The ruling, in effect, dismissed the claims of black male residents of
Oneonta, N.Y., and black male students at the State University of New York
College at Oneonta (SUCO) that they were mistreated by local police in a
1992 sweep in search of a burglary suspect.

You may remember the case. A 77-year-old woman in the mostly white town of
about 10,000 said she was attacked by a black man in her home near the SUCO
campus. She told police she hadn't seen her attacker's face, but knew (by
looking at his hands, one of which held a knife) that he was black and (by
watching his gait as he crossed her room) young.

Police asked a SUCO administrator for a list of black male students. The
list of some 125 names was handed over, and the police tried to locate and
question everyone on it. When that yielded nothing useful, they proceeded to
sweep the town, stopping virtually every black man they saw and inspecting
his hands for cuts. (The victim said she thought her assailant might have
cut himself.)

Black folk in Oneonta and across America were outraged - with the SUCO
administrator, Leif Hartmark, for violating their privacy and rendering them
up for what they saw as abuse of their rights as citizens, and with the
police for relying on a victim's vague description to make every black male
resident, student or traveler through the town a criminal suspect.

And some of those who were stopped sued. They needn't have bothered. The
case against Hartmark was dismissed in February 1997, by a three-judge U.S.
Court of Appeals sitting in Manhattan. It was unclear whether the rights of
the plaintiffs had been violated, the court ruled.

And then a few weeks ago, that same 2nd Circuit court dismissed the
complaints against the police administrators, saying their tactics did not
constitute discriminatory racial profiling because the officers were looking
for a suspect in a particular crime on the basis of a description.

Some description. A description that fit virtually every black and sprightly
man in the town. Forget about "driving while black," wrote New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert. Try "breathing while black," he said. "Trust me, if
some poor guy had innocently cut his finger while slicing a tomato for
dinner, he would have landed in jail."

Think about it. The black motorists on the interstates who are stopped as
suspected drug couriers on (the statistics would indicate) grounds that
conspicuously include their race at least are let go if the troopers'
suspicions turn out to be groundless - unless, of course, they overreact to
the insult and what they view as racial harassment, in which case all bets
are off.

But just imagine a black student unlucky enough to have cut or scratched
himself - slicing tomatoes, hanging Venetian blinds or working on his
10-speed - within a day or two of the assault. Who can doubt that he
wouldn't have been jailed? And who can imagine how he would have cleared
himself? A police line-up would have been useless; the victim never saw his
face. She should be expected to identify his hands?

How many people can have an air-tight alibi for 2 o'clock on a particular
Friday morning? Even if the luckless one had managed to win acquittal on
appeal (It wouldn't have surprised me greatly if a local jury had convicted
him), wouldn't a lot of us think he'd gotten off on a "technicality"?

For a guy who has seen and heard about an awful lot of police misconduct
during nearly four decades of newspapering (and who has experienced a bit of
it himself) I retain a certain amount of respect for people - including
cops - who try to do their jobs.

I wouldn't have expected the police in Oneonta to ignore the sliver of a
description they had, and to let that sliver direct their investigation.

But it was overreaching amateurishness to go from that sliver to turning the
town's black male population into a company of humiliated (and I dare say
frightened) suspects.

What is far more disturbing, though, is that a federal appellate court - no
amateurs there - can look at the facts of this affair and say: No problem.

Now that's a problem.