Profiling reveals racism behind practice

by Tony Bouza

    Three hundred and eighty-two years.
    That’s how long blacks have been here since first alighting from a slave ship in Jamestown, Va., in the summer of 1619.
    Since then, blacks experienced 244 years of slavery, a century of Jim Crow, a brief flurry of hope, followed by prison. Today, one in three adult black males is under some form of criminal justice control (prison, jail, parole, probation, etc.). Yet these (the “at risk population” of 15- to 25-year-old males) are only about 5 percent or less of America’s population.
    How did this come about?
    Racism—the identical spirit that animated all but the couple of years of hope in the ’60s. During that brief interlude, the juices of heightened expectations flowed into the hardening amber that trapped its targets.
    The guilty secret of America’s cops is that the overclass wants “those people” kept under control and out of sight. The mandate is never made explicit, but communicated in such codes as “law and order” and in the images of the nightly news.
    The underclass, despairing of a society that won’t employ (except for the Armed Forces), educate, include or nurture it, seeks escape in alcohol and drugs and expresses its protest in riots, violence and crime.
    Over the last 40 years we’ve seen about a five-fold increase in violent crime in America, with blacks serving disproportionate roles as both victims and perps. This is the slough of despondency, reflected in such recent figures as the 2000 census, that confirms the ever-widening economic and educational chasms between blacks and whites.
    One bright shaft of light is a recent study’s finding that more black kids are growing up in two parent homes (34.8 percent in 1995, 38.9 percent in 2000)—a truly heartening exception.
    In response to the tsunami of crime, violence, rioting and burning that swelled in the ’60s—reaching a crescendo in the early ’90s—the police developed a series of tactics:
    • Stake-outs were devised to confront armed robbers.
    • Decoys were created to lure muggers to attack disguised cops.
    • Stings were invented to attract burglars, with their loot, to police traps.
    • Tactical patrol units, evolved into SWAT operations and infiltrations, were widely used to develop intelligence on various groups—of the right and of the left—to cope with the massive demonstrations inspired by the Vietnam War and to control urban riots.
    The rise of black political power in cities gave voice to that community’s resentment over the imprisonment of its young men. It has never been said—as far as I know—but some appointments of black police chiefs contained the cynical calculation that they may be useful in discouraging riots.
    In 1973 a black candidate defeated a white former police chief in Detroit over the issue of dismantling the stake-out unit called Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.
    During the ’80s, black ministers, politicians and business leaders hauled me before the mayor to denounce decoy operations that resulted in a rate of 85 percent of those arrested being black males in a city where blacks constituted less than 5 percent of the population.
    The disproportionate involvement of black males in street crimes, as both their targets and suspects, means that any police operation will produce a preponderance of black males between either cohort. Compiling racial statistics on racial profiling is a waste of everyone’s time. The practice of profiling simply has to stop.
    Highly visible negotiations between the police and black leaders over racial profiling only illustrate the rhetorical dance of death surrounding the deeper question of white oppression, black criminality and the growing flaccidness of police response to the challenges of crime and violence.
    • Stings were severely criticized as being irresistible inducements to commit burglaries.
    • Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets officers engaged in gun battles with robbers in which many black males were killed. The unit was denounced as serving as judge, jury and executioner and the practice was widely abandoned.
    • Decoys were seen as constituting entrapment and many police agencies discontinued the practice, although I continued using them until my last day in office.
    • Stings succumbed to the same political pressures as caused the LAPD to abandon choke holds in the ’80s.
    • Tactical units remain, but infiltrations were thoroughly discredited and discontinued.
    The legality of these techniques, however, was never seriously challenged and there is no doubt that all are permitted by the U.S. Constitution. Our founding fathers were not wimps when it came to crime and violence—they just didn’t like Red Coats going through their houses.
    Racial profiling, however, is not legal.
    The practice presumes to create a profile of the likeliest to be engaged in a crime becuase of such anomalies as a young black male at the wheel of a Rolls Royce, to cite an extreme. It is a sort of statistical Russian roulette that attempts to identify wrongos—which is OK—but which adds the kicker of acting on those suspicions—which is not OK.
    Racial profiling is wrong, illegal and unconstitutional.
    Four words can eliminate this approach—articulable grounds and probable cause.
    No cop should stop any vehicle except for causes that can be described and evaluated and which are grounded in a demonstrable belief that a specific law has been breached.
    Profiling is an outgrowth of a semi-scientific attempt to describe the statistically likeliest characteristics of a crime suspect. It is fine in narrowing the focus to a few possiblilities and then gathering evidence to buttress the case. Where the police erred was in acting without evidence—subjecting a majority of innocent black males to the humiliation of a police stop. Even when practiced at its highest efficiency, the greatest number will not be involved in any criminal enterprise and even those who are will have been seized unconstitutionally.
    Racial profiling violates the Fourth Ammendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures.
    The difference between stake-outs, decoys, stings and racial profiling is that in the former three issues the suspect takes the initiative, commits a crime and the police respond, while in the latter, the police improperly anticipate a crime and act pre-emptively. This is illegal.
    We need to note that the only area of law enforcement where aggressive, proactive, undercover operations are still widely tolerated is in drug enforcement, although the Diallo and Dorismond cases in New York might tempt the black community to rethink its support.
    Violent crime, amazingly, declined sharply in the late ’90s, nationwide. Police executives stepped up to claim the credit. The problem was that violence ebbed everywhere, whether the chiefs had innovated strategies or dozed. And we can see that they had abandoned really aggressive tactics anyhow.
    So how did we wind up with two million prisoners, about half of whom are black males?
    Mostly because of mandated sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Now we have an increasingly geriatric prison population, about 600,000 of whom are going to be released this year.
    Behind the crime decline were a burgeoning economy, the peaking of the crack epidemic in 1985, a decline in “at risk” births because of Roe v. Wade in 1973 and other forces that may become clearer five or ten years hence. A lot of the decline is shrouded in mystery, notwithstanding the many attempts to explain it as having been produced because of the miraculous efforts of many police chiefs.
    So racial profiling becomes a grotesque and illegal by-product of policies intended to demonstrate police aggressiveness at the very moment that such energies are at their lowest levels.
    We’ll continue to engage in these irrelevant sideshows because we won’t talk about the elephant in the room—racism.