PROFILING IN LAW ENFORCEMENT

Do we really want to surrender to the drug organizations the means of
distributing their products?

This nation has recently been in an emotional discussion concerning the use
of profiles by law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, this debate has
been titled "racial profiling."

There is a saying in debating: If you can define the terms, you win the
contest. Utilizing the term, racial profiling, ensures that the debate will
be negative in tone and divisive in nature. I purpose that instead of
inflaming emotions, we take a look at what actually is being done in this
area of drug enforcement. This issue is so important to law enforcement and
its efforts to interdict drugs that a dispassionate examination is essential.

No government agency or law enforcement association, in their interdiction
training, teaches that race is a characteristic of drug couriers. Not the
Drug Enforcement Administration, United States Customs, The International
Association of Chiefs of Police or any national police association, period.
Officers are taught to look at the individual for characteristics or
indicators of drug courier activity. These characteristics, when seen in
clusters by trained officers, have been recognized as a valid investigative
tool by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Those who purport to be shocked that ethnic groups are over represented in
the population arrested for drug courier activities must have been in a
coma for the last 20 years. The fact is that ethnic groups control the
majority of the drug trade in the United States. They also tend to hire as
their underlings and couriers others of their same group. Why? Because
these are the people they grew up with, feel comfortable around and because
it is human nature.

The truth is, if you work drug interdiction in this country, you will not
arrest the same percentages of ethnic groups as represented in the U.S.
general population. People may not like it, but that is the reality.

The airport drug detail in Los Angeles compiled a breakdown of the percent
of ethnic groups they arrested. The first list was based on the officers'
observations of drug courier characteristics. They then compared that
percentage to those arrested utilizing characteristics gleaned from airline
computer information. The airline computers, as you can imagine, have no
category for an individual's ethnic makeup. The percentages from both
sources were almost identical. What does this mean? It means they were
arresting drug couriers by utilizing identifiable characteristics, not
race. The idea that officers refuse to arrest any drug couriers unless they
are members of a minority group is both insulting and ludicrous.

The recently retired administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA), Thomas Constantine, started a program to assist local police in the
arrest of violent drug offenders. The mobile enforcement teams (MET) are in
all the major cities. The Los Angeles MET team has had a number of
successful deployments in the greater Los Angeles area. They were so
successful in the Rampart area that the citizens commissioned a billboard
on Wilshire Boulevard thanking them for their work. In these deployments,
85 percent of the suspects arrested were minorities. Are these MET teams
and their local counterpart racist? Was Clinton appointee Mr. Constantine a
racist? Did Janet Reno let a racist program run wild in L.A? If you work in
a city where 99 percent of the crack is controlled by minorities,
inevitably the vast majority of couriers arrested will be minorities. It is
called reality and it will still be true no matter how hard the apologists
try to pretend it isn't.

The hard truth in America today is that the minorities of any major city
commit most of the street drug sales and get arrested disproportionately.

Are there a few officers foolishly taking race into account in their
profiling? Yes. Are some people doing foolish things where you work? Of
course. Are these officers racist? No. They usually are without formal
training and struggling to do their job. Most untrained people tend to do
their jobs poorly, stupidly and unevenly. No amount of cultural diversity
and sensitivity training will help unless a person is adequately trained to
do his job. When officers are exposed to a training program, they become
aware that race is not a drug courier characteristic. If they perform as
trained, end of problem. If they don't, they should be fired or, if civil
service rules intervene, assigned to counting flash light batteries in the
basement of the police station. Is the Justice Department expanding its
training in response to these allegations? No. It has cut DEA's budget for
interdiction training.

The federal government and some states reacted to these racial-profiling
allegations by requiring officers to record the race of citizens they
contact. What will be the reaction when these numbers indicate that ethnic
groups are interviewed and arrested in greater frequency than their
percentage in the U.S. general population? A variety of groups will demand
that drug interdiction efforts be curtailed and abolished.

What is the actual agenda of these outraged critics of drug interdiction?
Many of these groups are made up of the same people who advocate drug
legalization. What better way to de-facto legalize narcotics than to
cripple our nation's interdiction efforts? Drug interdiction is our first
line of defense against drugs entering our communities. Those officers
working our borders, airports, bus terminals and highways are our best
chance of having an impact on this problem.

The vast majority of drugs confiscated in the United States are through our
interdiction efforts. Do we really want to surrender to the drug
organizations the means of distributing their products? One can only hope
that this country will not jeopardize the health and future of our children
because of the agenda of a few self-serving groups.