Racial profiling or good police work?

Racial profiling or simply good police work is the elephant in the closet question in the eternal debate over whether police target black and Hispanic men in street stops under the guise of fighting crime. There's no debate about whether police do stop tens of thousands of black and Hispanic every year on the streets and that they are far more likely to be stopped than white men. The Associated Press is the latest to weigh in on the chronic problem. It found that police stopped a staggering one million plus persons on big city streets in 2008. As usual the overwhelming majority were black and Hispanic males.

The ACLU and civil rights groups again charged that the stops were racially motivated. Police groups and city officials again denied it. They countered that the stops not only were warranted but are the major reason for the plunge in crime to the lowest level in decades.

There may be some validity to the police contention. Crime is way down. Streets are arguably safer. Most citizens and that include a significant number of blacks and Hispanic residents and community groups, silently and in some cases publicly, applaud police efforts to fight crime. They are more likely the victims of black on black and Hispanic on Hispanic crime and violence.

But the proponents of massive street stops still dodge two crucial questions. One is that the overwhelming majority of stops result in no arrests, or even citations. And no weapons or drugs are found. New York, for instance, topped the AP list in number of street stops. The NYPD made more than a half million street stops in 2008. Only 10 percent of the persons stopped were arrested. The AP found a comparable low number of arrests in relation to the high number of street stops in every other city. The obvious question is why so many stops are made to arrest so few if the stops are completely racial neutral? The question still dangles unanswered.

The other troubling and largely unanswered question is why many of those who have been stopped have been prominent black and Latino professionals, business leaders, and even some state legislators and House representatives? The national firestorm over the cuff and momentary arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates tossed the ugly glare back on the susceptibility of even celebrated black men to be hauled off when there's even the slightest suspicion, mistaken or otherwise, of criminal wrongdoing. President Obama has said that there were times in earlier days when he felt that he had been profiled by Chicago police.

Before the September 11 terror attacks, civil rights leaders had made some headway in drawing public attention to the fight against racial profiling. In its report "Police Practices and Civil Rights in America" issued in 1999, the Civil Rights Commission called on police departments to immediately fire any officer guilty of racial profiling. The Justice Department initiated investigations of police departments in several cities for civil rights violations, mostly against young black and Latino males. It brokered consent decrees with city officials in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles to rein in the blatant, and well documented abusive practices of police departments in those cities in those years.

There was some hope that Congress would finally consider passing the Traffic Stops Statistics Study Act introduced by Michigan Democrat John Conyers in 1999 and 2000. The bill required the Justice Department to compile figures from local police departments by race on highway traffic stops. The data would document why a driver was stopped and whether an arrest was made or not. The Justice Department could use the figures to determine how pervasive racial profiling was. The bill did not force local police agencies to collect data and imposed no sanctions on those that refuse to compile stats. The Conyers bill was still born in Congress. It remains so today, even though Conyers has periodically introduced versions of the bill during the past decade.

President Obama has lightly hinted that the issue of racial profiling is something that his administration may revisit in the future. He has even urged congressional leaders to follow suit and reexamine the issue, again at some unspecified point in the future.

The Associated Press did not take any position or draw any conclusions from its report. It gave equal time to the ACLU and various police and city officials to make their respective arguments that the stops were needed to fight crime, and there was no racial harassment involved. Or that the colossal number of stops police make are again proof positive that police do systematically profile black and Hispanic men. The eternal debate over whether the stops are racial profiling or good police work will continue to rage and so will the two dangling unanswered questions about why do police need to stop so many black and Hispanic men including at times prominent black and Hispanic men to successfully fight crime.