DON'T TARGET THE INNOCENT IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

War, we’re told, calls for serious measures. Rights are secondary.
So, in an extreme version of "profiling," Japanese-Americans during
World War 11 were deemed more likely than the rest of the populace to
engage in subversive activities and thus were kicked out of their
homes and placed in detention camps.

Today we as a society have said we want our government to fight a war
on drugs. Part of this war, it seems, includes stopping innocent
people the police say fit the profile of drug dealers, in hopes of
getting a closer look at them and observing some behavior that would
present a reason to search their vehicles. The rationale is that some
crimes are statistically more likely to be committed by members of one
ethnic or racial group than another.

In other words, you go hunting where the ducks are.

Or do you?

It's time to ask ourselves some questions, like:

Are we so intent on preventing drug trafficking that we'll tolerate
people who are not criminals being stopped because of the color of
their skin? What's the ratio of innocent people stopped to
perpetrators nabbed? Whatever the number turns out to be, is it an
aceptable tradeoff?

Letters sections of New Jersey newspapers these days are filled with
the view that the police are just "doing their job" and that people
who are pulled over and then let go should quit bellyaching and
support the effort to rid us of drugs.

Well, if you accept that view, maybe we should step up the war. Let's
put checkpoints at New Jersey's borders and search every car entering
or leaving the state. After all, some drug dealers must be white, so
why shouldn't whites be stopped as well? Yes, many irate drivers would
feel they were being inconvenienced needlessly. But we'd confiscate
even more drugs and discourage more drug traders from passing through
the state than we do with the hit-and-miss tactic of racial profiling.

Of course the public would oppose measures so drastic as stopping all
people, even those not observed committing crimes or even violating
traffic laws. But anyone who says it's okay to pull over some people
who haven't done anything wrong but not all of them is nothing more
than a draft dodger in the war on drugs.

So let's tell the police they can stop cars only when they see a law
being violated. Won't some drug dealers slip through? Yes. But that
wouldn't mean we're surrendering in the war on drugs - not unless you
think the New Jersey Turnpike is the only possible battleground. Such
a strategy would still leave arrests when drugs are sold or used,
undercover infiltration of drug gangs, education programs like DARE
and a host of other methods, including pulling over drivers on the
Turnpike when they really do break the law. We'd be fighting the war
in a way consistent with what we say we believe. That's the kind of
war people can support.

I don't feel safer knowing that in exchange for a certain number of
drug runners being arrested on the Turnpike a larger number of
innocent citizens must forfeit some of their rights for the supposed
greater good, The alienation this practice breeds and the erosion of
respect for the law that can only result from profiling carry a higher
long-term cost for our society than if a few drug dealers make it up
the New Jersey Turnpike.