What's Race Got To Do With It?
By John Cloud
No one is saying that being a street cop is easy. You have to be a social worker one day and gear up for a riot the next. You are supposed to be winsome and unruffled as you ask that drunk to stop peeing on the sidewalk. The pay is bad, and, oh, yeah, you could get killed every day.
But are cops actually victims, oppressed like a minority group? Many have begun to feel that way, as everyone from the White House to the city council in Peoria has looked into racial profiling. "There's a tiny number of police officers who may be stopping people because of race, but for many of us these days, it's guilt by uniform," says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.), the largest police union in the U.S. "It's wrong to characterize a person because of the color of their uniform."
That may sound like self-serving twaddle if you have experienced racial profiling firsthand, as a staggering 52% of black men said they had in a study co-sponsored by the Washington Post. But what happens when cops believe they too are victims, when they become convinced they can't do their jobs without being called racists or being falsely accused of using improper force--offenses that could get them fired?
What happens is Cincinnati, Ohio. In the tense months since three days of violent confrontations in April between mostly black protesters and mostly white police, many cops seem to have taken a breather. According to figures the city provided TIME, in June of this year police made 2,517 arrests for nonviolent crimes such as disorderly conduct and weapons violations; in June of last year they made 5,063 such arrests. Arrests for violent crimes, such as murder and arson, declined slightly, to 487 from 502, despite a 20% jump from the previous June in the incidence of those crimes. The figures for May, the month after the rioting, are similar. "Our officers are very frustrated at this rise in crimes," says Keith Fangman, president of the Cincinnati chapter of the F.O.P. "[But they] are afraid of being labeled a racial profiler every time they arrest someone."
Of course, there are other interpretations of the department's behavior. For instance, it suggests that officers have become intoxicated by authority--by the expanded powers of arrest, search and seizure that the courts and many legislatures have given them in recent years. Some cops seem to be saying that if they can't run free, they won't leave the station house.
That would seem to set up a choice: Are we to have a low-crime society, in which cops are violent cowboys, or a high-crime culture, in which cops can't stop a mob without written Justice Department approval? That dilemma is surely a creaky contrivance. Police can be effective without being jackbooted thugs. But many cities besides Cincinnati will probably face this question in coming months as lawmakers look to monitor police activity and as police protest the new rules.
The response of politicians to the outcry over racial profiling amounts to a lawmaking jamboree. Congress is considering the End Racial Profiling Act, which would force local police to record the race of everyone subjected to a traffic or pedestrian stop and to punish officers who rely on race when deciding whether to stop someone. Thirteen states and hundreds of localities have enacted legislation designed to reduce or at least study racial profiling. Bills are pending in at least 12 other states. Everyone from Attorney General John Ashcroft, long a conservative on race issues, to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, long a liberal, has denounced racial profiling. Declared President Bush in February: "It is wrong, and we must end it."
But what, exactly, is "it"? One doesn't diminish the gravity of racial profiling by noting that there is no accepted understanding of what the term means. It is not in criminology texts. It seems to have been popularized in the early '90s by activists and reporters in New Jersey, not cops. Before we can tell police what they are doing wrong, we must figure it out for ourselves.
When Americans first became interested in the idea of criminal "profiling," it seemed a heroic pursuit. A decade ago we fell in love with Clarice Starling, the fictional FBI agent chasing a serial killer. But was Starling a racial profiler? Remember the scene in The Silence of the Lambs in which Special Agent Crawford asks for a description of the man the two are after? Her first answer is that the killer is "a white male." It just so happens that nearly all American serial killers have been white men. It just so happens that blacks commit a disproportionate percentage of rapes and (nonserial) murders in the U.S. But when should acting on such information become a crime? When does the useful practice of criminal profiling become the inglorious practice of racial profiling?
Most often we use the latter term to describe the police practice of stopping people for "driving while black," but there are myriad permutations. Actor Danny Glover held a press conference in 1999 because cabdrivers weren't stopping for him in New York City; some called this "hailing while black." In May the American Civil Liberties Union got the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to repay $7,000 it had seized from a black businessman in the Omaha, Neb., airport on the (quite false) theory that it was drug money. The A.C.L.U. called it "flying while black." Dr. Lauren Shaiova, a pain specialist who treats sickle-cell-disease patients at Manhattan's Beth Israel Medical Center, says doctors have long allowed African-American sickle-cell sufferers to agonize because they assume blacks will become addicted to pain medication. Call it "ailing while black."
And it's not just a black thing. Columnist Roberto Rodriguez has written about having his car "ripped apart" by federal agents in New Mexico two years ago because he was traveling "a suspicious route." In June the U.S. Department of Transportation began investigating complaints that Arab Americans are searched too often at the Detroit airport. And a judge is considering whether to open sealed documents from the FBI's untidy case against Wen Ho Lee, a former Los Alamos engineer who was accused of stealing U.S. nuclear information. Last year Lee pleaded guilty to improperly downloading classified material, but activists say the sealed documents may prove he was targeted because of his Taiwanese heritage.
But how much racial profiling actually occurs? Criminologists are still debating how to answer that question. Should we take the percentage of traffic stops for a certain racial group and hold it against that group's percentage in the population? Or should it be the percentage of stops vs. the actual driving presence of that group in the area where the stops were made? If we are talking about the percentage of people arrested for a certain crime, can we consider the rate at which others of their race have been picked up for that crime in the past, or is that data always tainted by the racism of the cops who arrested them?
"It's very hard to measure these things," says Samuel Walker of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, author of Police Accountability. He wrote a paper suggesting that the best way to analyze the traffic-stop activity of particular officers is to measure it against the work of other officers pulling comparable shifts. Then, presumably, those cops who disproportionately stop blacks or Latinos (or whites, for that matter) could be identified. Walker's approach seems sound, but almost no cities collect traffic-stop data on a cop-by-cop basis.
The ones that do, like Pittsburgh, Pa., are reluctant to make the raw data public. "Get in the habit of reporting that, and you can create controversy," says Robert McNeilly Jr., the city's police chief. He says random quarter-to-quarter fluctuations in the data would produce misleading headlines, like RACIAL PROFILING ON THE RISE IN PITTSBURGH. McNeilly says a federal auditor has consistently found that the city's police stop minorities in "pretty close" proportion to their all-around presence in the population.
Why aren't the proportions exactly the same? McNeilly, a compact, muscled white man who has decent relations with black leaders in town, says class, not race, is the answer. "Poor neighborhoods have drugs being sold, disorderly conduct, gangs, trash being thrown on the street, fights, loud music. So police will make more stops in those areas," he says. He notes that he "constantly" gets requests from black neighborhoods for more--not fewer--cops to patrol the streets.
Which brings us to another delicate matter: Can racial profiling sometimes be justified? That depends on your definition, which requires a short jaunt into the history of the term. Most criminologists credit former FBI chief of research Howard Teten with inventing (or at least popularizing) the idea of "profiling." In the late 1950s, Teten was a rare combination of cop and scholar. He worked crime scenes for the San Leandro, Calif., police and took classes in psychology at Berkeley. Now 68, Teten says most departments back then gathered evidence at crime scenes only to find direct clues about a criminal--a dropped matchbox, for instance. But Teten looked at the way the criminal committed the crime to build a psychological profile of him--his personality, his mental status. "You might see overreaction toward a certain part of the body or use of the weapon in a way that is not usually seen," Teten says.
His techniques helped solve many crimes, and in 1969 he began teaching courses on profiling for the FBI. Within a decade, agents who had taken his courses had migrated throughout the bureau, and by the early '80s, profiling had spread to some local police departments. But Teten says his fairly limited notion of profiling--identifying a criminal's personality traits by analyzing the nature of his crime--was expanded too quickly by police who didn't have much training in psychology. Teten thought of profiling as a tool primarily for murder investigations, but it was now being used even in robberies.
To make matters worse, as the crack epidemic began in the 1980s, harried cops had no time to construct elaborate criminal profiles. Simple ones would suffice. In 1983 the Illinois state police began targeting cocaine couriers in and around Chicago. Going after low-level couriers is a shockingly inefficient way to fight drugs, but coke was spreading around the city quickly, and politicians demanded action. Most of the couriers the state police initially caught were young Hispanic men who, when questioned during traffic stops, didn't have a good answer about where they were going.
That profile, involving four components--young, Hispanic, male, confused--became famous in the 1980s because of the DEA's Operation Pipeline. Pipeline was essentially a series of training seminars the DEA built around the Illinois strategy of targeting couriers. Local police around the nation--particularly in the Southwest and along the East Coast--were taught to profile these couriers. In 1999, Donnie Marshall, then No. 2 at the DEA, proudly told Congress that Operation Pipeline had led to seizures of 116,188 kg of cocaine, 748 kg of crack and 872,777 kg of marijuana, and that half a billion dollars in drug money had been seized.
What Marshall didn't discuss was the toll Operation Pipeline took on minorities. No one will ever know how many innocent men and boys were searched for drugs as part of Operation Pipeline. But we do know that many Hispanics today feel betrayed by the criminal-justice system. Does that mean Operation Pipeline was a total failure? No one worth hearing argues that race should be the only factor in police decision-making, but should race never be part of a criminal profile? The legislation pending in Congress would outlaw any use of race in traffic or pedestrian stops, even if race is only one of many factors cops have adduced in a profile. Of course, cops would still be able to stop an African American if they thought he was a specific black suspect, but otherwise race would be barred from "routine investigatory activities." In other words, the bill would ban projects like Operation Pipeline.
It's unclear whether President Bush will sign such a provision. He has spoken against racial profiling in only the most general terms. But conservatives are mounting a campaign to defeat the legislation. In the City Journal, based in New York City, Heather Mac Donald, senior fellow of a right-leaning think tank called the Manhattan Institute, argues that disproportionate traffic stops may be rational because there is "some evidence" that minorities commit more traffic violations per capita.
She cites a 1998 study in a journal called Accident Analysis and Prevention showing that in 1973, 1986 and 1996, in random surveys of thousands of drivers across the U.S., African Americans were more likely than whites to fail breath tests for alcohol. (Hispanics were less likely to fail the tests than whites in 1973, but in 1986 and 1996, years that are under scrutiny in the racial-profiling debate, a greater percentage of Hispanics failed the test.)
Mac Donald also writes that "in Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist-fatality rate than whites." And blacks do have more fatal traffic accidents per mile driven than whites, but the difference is negligible. According to Siim Soot, the transportation expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago from whom Mac Donald obtained her data, in 1990 whites in Illinois had .014 fatalities per million miles driven while the rate for Illinois blacks was .015 per million. Latinos in the state did have a much higher rate--.022--but Soot's sample of Latinos was quite small. "The conclusions here are not overwhelming in one direction or another," says Soot.
For the sake of argument, assume for a moment that blacks and Hispanics are worse drivers--more likely to drive drunk, more likely to be involved in fatalities. (We know from federal studies that only 51% of blacks wear seat belts, vs. 62% of whites.) But is any of that relevant? Worries about traffic safety may be one reason minorities are stopped more often than whites, but those concerns don't explain--at least not entirely--why they are searched more often. Cops search cars for many reasons besides traffic safety--usually because the officers smell or see something in the car that looks suspicious, like a joint or a gun. The disparate search figures are stunning. In San Diego, which has released a study of its vehicle stops for the year 2000, both blacks and Hispanics who were stopped by police had a 10% chance of being searched, and whites had only a 3% chance. Contraband was found in about 13% of searches of both whites and blacks--but only in 5% of searches of Hispanics.
Perhaps police are more likely to search minorities because they commit a disproportionate number of crimes. William Tucker makes this point in an article in the conservative Weekly Standard. According to the latest federal figures, blacks are 12% of the U.S. population but account for 27% of all sexual-assault convictions, 66% of all robbery convictions and 38% of all fraud and embezzlement convictions. Yet it seems unlikely that a traffic officer who searches a black motorist on the shoulder of a highway believes he is stopping a robbery, rape or embezzlement.
Forget the numbers for a minute, and return to Cincinnati. Three months ago, riots erupted in the city after a white officer shot and killed an unarmed black man, Timothy Thomas, who was sought by authorities not for murder or rape but for a dozen misdemeanors, many of them traffic violations. There was a sense that Thomas had been racially profiled to death.
Because Cincinnati--like many cities--doesn't yet collect racial data on police activity, it is hard to say whether the police force is as bad as some claim. But several facts about the force may help explain why many blacks feel that cops are biased--why they may believe they were racially profiled during a traffic stop even if their taillight was burned out. First, the police division is only 28% African American, while the city is 43% black. Cincinnati is the 10th most segregated city in the nation, according to the 2000 Census. That segregation is reflected in the police division, many of whose ranking officers graduated from the same Catholic high school on the (mostly white) West Side.
Racial suspicion abounds on the force. Some white cops fume about hiring practices established in 1987 to make the division more racially balanced. For every 4 whites promoted, 1 black must be promoted. "Can you imagine how you'd feel," asks Fangman of the Fraternal Order of Police, "if you studied your a__ off, got the right score and got passed over because of race?" Black officers are embittered too. "There are 16 captains--1 is black. There are 41 lieutenants--6 are black," notes Scotty Johnson, president of the Sentinels, a black police group. "I don't think they object to blacks in the police force, but it makes them nervous when we start moving up."
Johnson just bought a new Mercedes. "Oh, I can see it on their faces," he says of his co-workers. "How is a black guy driving that car? You know that car is safer from getting 'accidentally' dented if I park in the 'ghetto' Taft High School lot than if I park on the police lot? We're constantly being racially profiled by our white colleagues. So of course they're doing it on the street."
So Cincinnati is a place where even the authorities--black and white--suspect that authority works against them. In a city where even fellow officers don't entirely trust one another, no wonder mere citizens raise their antennae during police encounters. Reports of racial profiling have taught many of us to be suspicious of cops. But if we act suspicious, cops notice. And when cops get scared--is that guy reaching for a wallet or his gun?--the whole process of distrust and fear can all too easily spiral into danger.
We will never know how often racist white police officers pull people over because they belong to a minority. But there are some signs that police departments have improved over the past 25 years. Since 1976, the number of African Americans killed by police each year has fallen by more than half, according to the Justice Department, from a rate of about 11 per million to 5 per million in 1998. With a few notable exceptions--Los Angeles, for one--most departments are less corrupt and more accountable than ever.
The debate over racial profiling may be giving that trend another shove. And it will yield mountains of data in the next few years as police departments begin to release figures on the people they stop. But the hard part will be to figure out why they stop them--and whether race should ever be part of the reason.
--With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Cincinnati and Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis
TIME.com Visit time.com to see more of James Nachtwey's photographs from Cincinnati
With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/Cincinnati and Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis