What's Race Got To Do With It?

Sunday, Jul. 22, 2001 By JOHN CLOUD

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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."