Bobo

Cont'd:

Although blacks and Latinos often control large drug sale networks, roughly
eight in ten drug busts are not for dealing, but for possession. Drug busts
for narcotics trafficking rarely stem from random searches of persons or
vehicles?the kind of practice rightly labeled profiling?but rather, tend to
take place after a carefully devised sting operation and intelligence
gathering, leading to focused law enforcement efforts. As such, the usage
numbers are the more pertinent when discussing the kinds of police stops and
searches covered by the pejorative label of ?profiling.?

A Department of Justice study released in 2001 notes that although blacks
are twice as likely as whites to have their cars stopped and searched,
police are actually twice as likely to find evidence of illegal activity in
cars driven by whites.

In New Jersey, for 2000, although blacks and Latinos were 78 percent of
persons stopped and searched on the southern portion of the Jersey Turnpike,
police were twice as likely to discover evidence of illegal activity in cars
driven by whites, relative to blacks, and whites were five times more likely
to be in possession of drugs, guns, or other illegal items relative to
Latinos.

In North Carolina, black drivers are two-thirds more likely than whites to
be stopped and searched by the State Highway Patrol, but contraband is
discovered in cars driven by whites 27 percent more often.

In New York City, even after controlling for the higher crime rates by
blacks and Latinos and local demographics (after all, people of color will
be the ones stopped and searched most often in communities where they make
up most of the residents), police are still two to three times more likely
to search them than whites. Yet, police hunches about who is in possession
of drugs, guns, other illegal contraband, or who is wanted for commission of
a violent crime turn out to be horribly inaccurate. Despite being stopped
and searched more often, blacks and Latinos are less likely to be arrested
because they are less likely to be found with evidence of criminal
wrongdoing.

So much for MacDonald?s ?rational? police officers, operating from their
personal experiences. Despite police claims that they only stop and search
people of color more often because such folks engage in suspicious behavior
more often, if the ?hit rates? for such persons are no higher than, and even
lower than the rates for whites, this calls into question the validity of
the suspicious action criteria. If blacks seem suspicious more often, but
are actually hiding something less often, then by definition the actions
deemed suspicious should be reexamined, as they are not proving to be
logical at all, let alone the result of good police work. Indeed, they
appear to be proxies for racial stops and searches.

Nor can the disproportionate stopping of black vehicles be justified by
differential driving behavior. Every study done on the subject has been
clear: there are no significant differences between people of color and
whites when it comes to the commission of moving or other violations. Police
acknowledge that virtually every driver violates any number of minor laws
every time they take to the road. But these violations are not enforced
equally and that is the problem.

In one New Jersey study, for example, despite no observed differences in
driving behavior, African Americans were 73 percent of all drivers stopped
on the Jersey Turnpike, despite being less than 14 percent of the drivers on
the road: a rate that is 27 times greater than what would be expected by
random chance. Similar results were found in a study of stops in Maryland.
On a particular stretch of Interstate 95 in Florida, known for being a drug
trafficking route, blacks and Latinos comprise only 5 percent of drivers,
but 70 percent of those stopped by members of the Highway Patrol. These
stops were hardly justified, as only nine drivers, out of 1,100 stopped
during the study, were ever ticketed for any violation, let alone arrested
for possession of illegal contraband.

As for Levin?s claim that whites should properly consider one in four black
males encountered to be a threat to their personal safety, because of their
involvement with the criminal justice system, it should be remembered that
most of these have been arrested for non-violent offenses like drug
possession. Blacks comprise 35 percent of all possession arrests and 75
percent of those sent to prison for a drug offense, despite being only 14
percent of users.

When it comes to truly dangerous violent crime, only a miniscule share of
African Americans will commit such offenses in a given year and less than
half of these will choose a white victim.

With about 1.5 million violent crimes committed by blacks each year (about
90 percent of these by males) and 70 percent of the crimes committed by just
7 percent of the offenders?a commonly accepted figure by criminologists?this
means that less than 2 percent of blacks over age 12 (the cutoff for
collecting crime data) and less than 3.5 percent of black males over 12
could even theoretically be considered dangerous. Less than 1.5 percent of
black males will attack a white person in a given year, hardly lending
credence to Levin?s claim about the rationality of white panic.


The fact remains that the typical offender in violent crime categories is
white. So even if black rates are disproportionate to their population
percentages, any ?profile? that tends to involve a black or Latino face is
likely to be wrong more than half the time. Whites commit roughly 60 percent
of violent crimes, for example. So if 6 in 10 violent criminals are white,
how logical could it be to deploy a profile?either for purposes of law
enforcement or merely personal purposes of avoiding certain people?that is
only going to be correct 40 percent of the time? So too with drugs, where
any profile that involves a person of color will be wrong three out of four
times?

Additionally, the apologists for profiling are typically selective in terms
of the kinds of profiling they support. Although whites are a
disproportionate percentage of all drunk drivers, for example, and although
drunk driving contributes to the deaths of more than 10,000 people each
year, none of the defenders of anti-black or brown profiling suggests that
drunk driving roadblocks be set up in white suburbs where the ?hit rates?
for catching violators would be highest.

Likewise, though white college students are considerably more likely to
binge drink (often underage) and use narcotics than college students of
color, no one suggests that police or campus cops should regularly stage
raids on white fraternity houses or dorm rooms occupied by whites, even
though the raw data would suggest such actions might be statistically
justified.

Whites are also nearly twice as likely to engage in child sexual
molestation, relative to blacks. Yet how would the Heather MacDonalds and
Dinesh D?Souzas of the world react to an announcement that adoption agencies
were going to begin screening out white couples seeking to adopt, or
subjecting them to extra scrutiny, as a result of such factual information?

Similarly, those seeking to now justify intensified profiling of Arabs or
Muslims since September 11 were hardly clamoring for the same treatment of
white males in the wake of Oklahoma City. Even now, in the wake of anthrax
incidents that the FBI says have almost certainly been domestic, possibly
white supremacist in origin, no one is calling for heightened suspicion of
whites as a result.

The absurdity of anti-Arab profiling is particularly obvious in the case of
trying to catch members of al-Qaeda. The group, after all, operates in 64
countries, many of them non-Arab, and from which group members would not
look anything like the image of a terrorist currently locked in the minds of
so many. Likewise, Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber recently captured
was able to get on the plane he sought to bring down precisely because he
had a ?proper English name,? likely spoke with a proper English accent, and
thus, didn?t fit the description.

The bottom line is that racial profiling doesn?t happen because data
justifies the practice, but rather because those with power are able to get
away with it, and find it functional to do so as a mechanism of social
control over those who are less powerful. By typifying certain ?others? as
dangerous or undesirable, those seeking to maintain divisions between people
whose economic and social interests are actually quite similar can
successfully maintain those cleavages.

No conspiracy here, mind you: just the system working as intended, keeping
people afraid of one another and committed to the maintenance of the system,
by convincing us that certain folks are a danger to our well-being, which
then must be safeguarded by a growing prison-industrial complex and
draconian legal sanctions; or in the case of terrorist ?profiles,? by the
imposition of unconstitutional detentions, beefed-up military and
intelligence spending, and the creation of a paranoiac wartime footing.

Until and unless the stereotypes that underlie racial profiling are attacked
and exposed as a fraud, the practice will likely continue: not because it
makes good sense, but because racist assumptions about danger?reinforced by
media and politicians looking for votes?lead us to think that it does.