Commentary

'RACIAL PROFILING' IS BAD POLICING

Are America's cops on the verge of crisis? A cascade of revelations this
year has further eroded many Americans' confidence that the nation's
law-enforcement agencies function free of racial bias. But while police
brutality makes most of the headlines, mainstream black Americans find
themselves more intimately identifying with stories of a more common form
of official bias: the use of race to "profile" suspects.

In April, New Jersey Attorney General Peter Verniero released a report
finding that state troopers routinely used the race of drivers on the New
Jersey Turnpike to decide whom to stop and search. Gov. Christine Todd
Whitman declared that New Jersey had been "infected by [a] national
problem." But rather than provoking surprise and outrage among blacks, the
report elicited a familiar anger and frustration. Many black Americans have
long swapped stories of confrontations with traffic-patrol officers,
apparently precipitated by little more than a policeman's stereotypes about
the types of cars and neighborhoods in which black citizens should be
found. The phenomenon has a colloquial label--"DWB," or driving while black.

Given that black and Hispanic men commit a disproportionate share of
violent and drug-related crimes in the U.S. today, reasonable people may
ask why racial profiling should be so controversial. If black and Hispanic
men are substantially more likely than others to commit serious crimes, is
it not logical to include black or Hispanic ancestry in generalized
criminal profiles? Perhaps. But a mere logical nexus between means and end
is an insufficient governing principle for an institution--like law
enforcement--that depends for its viability on the confidence of those that
it serves.

Law-enforcement leaders and policy makers should be mindful of two
significant social consequences of such official race-consciousness. First,
allowing officers to use race as an element of probable cause places police
departments on a slippery slope to civil-rights abuses. State-sanctioned
race-consciousness--whether invidious or ostensibly benign--too frequently
provides a pretext for officials to act on illegitimate biases.
Accordingly, better to remove race from the tools of statecraft than risk
sanctioning its impermissible official use.

Second and more important, permitting officers to use race as an element of
probable cause encourages blacks and Hispanics to think that
law-enforcement agencies cannot be trusted. These perceptions are often at
odds with those held by most whites, which can create potentially volatile
divisions within the community. Consider the racial perception gap laid
bare in the wake of the trials of O.J. Simpson and the cops who beat Rodney
King.

For a more recent example, look no further than the divergent attitudes of
black and white New Jersey residents toward their state police. In a
Star-Ledger/Eagleton Poll taken shortly after the release of the report on
racial profiling, 84% of white New Jerseyites expressed confidence that
state troopers were doing an excellent or good job patrolling the state's
highways, a figure consistent with polls in prior years. By contrast, only
31% of black New Jerseyites surveyed expressed similar confidence in state
troopers, down from 56% a year ago.

Black New Jerseyites' diminishing confidence in their law-enforcement
officers should trouble anyone who believes that the authority of
legitimate government derives from the consent of the governed. Clearly a
substantial proportion of the governed in New Jersey and elsewhere lack
confidence in the fundamental fairness of those purporting to protect them.

To make matters worse, the communities most in need of effective policing
are those disproportionately populated by black and Hispanic citizens. Many
of the nation's poorest urban communities are beset by crime and drugs.
Honest, hardworking citizens in those cities are frequently the victims of
crime. But those citizens frequently respond to the epidemic of crime not
with crime-busting fervor, but with a pronounced ambivalence toward
law-enforcement authorities, an ambivalence born of mistrust.

For honest cops seeking to make their urban beats safer, the ambivalence of
law-abiding black and Hispanic citizens makes their jobs more difficult.
Citizens who mistrust cops are less likely to provide tips and to cooperate
with officers seeking information or assistance. Thus high-crime areas
heavily populated by blacks and Hispanics are less safe than they would be
if the police force enjoyed the support of law-abiding citizens.

How policy makers respond to the revelation that some police officers use
race as a proxy for probable cause to stop and search certain citizens will
tell us much about our civic commitment to effective crime fighting and
about our commitment to genuinely representative government. So yes,
America's cops are on the verge of a crisis. But sadly, as a result, so are
those of us most in need of their protection.