POLICE PROFILING NEEDS POLICING

Picture the gleaming cruiser bearing down in the rearview mirror, the
sudden pulse of alternating headlights, the officer striding toward
the driver's door.

You're not exceeding the speed limit. Your license, registration, and
inspection sticker are up to date. Your car is in perfect working
order. But your apparent problem: Driving While Black, an offense,
obviously, with no easy remedy, and a plight to which a white person
can barely relate.

Suddenly, the orders come fast and furious. License and registration,
please. Or worse: Out of the car while we conduct a brief search. Or
worst of all: Get into the back of the cruiser; we're bringing you to
the station.

For the length of the stop, the driver has been thrust into a
humiliating world of suspicion, where he is at the mercy of an officer
who regards him not as a husband, father, custodian, or engineer, but
as a possible criminal, based on nothing more than the color of his
skin.

Take the case of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Paul L. D.
Russell Jr., pulled over by two Reading police officers in November
for an expired license plate. The officers hauled Russell to the
station and detained him, despite the fact he was driving an
undercover car with blue lights and showed his badge and credentials.
His lawyer mused that if this happened to a black DEA agent, who else
was it happening to?

Here's who: Damien Mahaffey, who works at Bentley College in Waltham.
He moved to a campus apartment in July. From August to October, police
in neighboring Belmont pulled him over three times for no good reason,
not once issuing a ticket. His wife was pulled over twice. It got so
bad that Mahaffey now tells his wife not to drive through Belmont late
at night and advises friends to avoid the town when they're coming to
visit.

''If it's isolated, you chalk it up to an ignorant person,'' says
Mahaffey, who has also been helped by Belmont officers when he's had
car trouble. ''But if you have different people doing this to you,
then it's not isolated anymore.''

Ask any group of black men about their roadway predicaments, and the
tales will spill forth, no matter the story teller's physical
appearance, station in life, or history of abiding by the law.

Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general of the United States, said
New Jersey troopers approached him at a turnpike rest stop 20 years
ago and asked to search his car.

At the Globe, city editor Joe Williams was once pulled over in
Richmond, Va., a block from his apartment, by a screaming police
officer who was about to yank his car door open. But a white woman, an
assault victim, came running up yelling that the officer had the wrong
man. Last year, Williams was followed by a Cambridge cruiser while
walking to an ATM machine, stopped, and questioned. He was held until
the officer radioed a dispatcher and cleared him.

From New Jersey to Maryland to California, stories abound about
roadway injustices, about the subtle and not so subtle consequences of
race. And by every measure, the problem is a complex one.

Statistics show that blacks, especially young blacks, commit crimes in
greater proportion than whites, many of them crimes against other
blacks. Police should be able to give voice to this truth without
being accused of racism or, as in the case of the head of the New
Jersey State Police, fired from their jobs.

But at the same time, law enforcement officials should not try to
translate statistical observations into social policy that casts a
shadow of blame over innocent people. In America, people are not
guilty by association, by gender, by profession, or by race. Thus,
racial profiling is an abomination, a gross violation of people's rights.

The problem of profiling is difficult to quantify. To understand it,
you have to identify it, and police invariably deny that it exists.
Police chiefs and commissioners in Boston, Belmont, and Brookline
declined to return calls yesterday. But the problem is there, lurking
around the corner for every black man driving home from work in the
dark of night.

On Beacon Hill, Senator Dianne Wilkerson, a Roxbury Democrat, has
proposed a two-year study period during which police would be required
to track the race, gender, and age of motorists in routine stops and
report them to the state attorney general. ''There is something going
on on our highways,'' Wilkerson said. ''We have to be big enough in
Massachusetts to look into this.''

It's a good, modest, constructive start to solving a confounding
problem. We should be able to speak truths, flattering or not.