Heeding Minority Concerns, Reno Tackles Racial Profiling

The Clinton administration has finally interceded in the boiling controversy over racial profiling. The practice, used by law enforcement officials to identify individuals with certain racial or other characteristics statistically associated with criminal activity, is at the heart of a broad outcry over police discrimination. Attorney General Janet Reno, who has been meeting with police chiefs from around the country, said at her weekly press conference that she would ask police departments to start collecting data on the issue. Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly, meanwhile, is creating an independent panel to review his agency's own policies and procedures.

Racial profiling is a potent political issue, not only because of the charges of discrimination it raises, but also, according to TIME New York correspondent Elaine Rivera, "because the African-American community has been one of Bill Clinton's strongest supporters, as was particularly evidenced during his impeachment battle." In New Jersey, where two white state troopers last April fired 11 shots into a van carrying three African-Americans and a Hispanic, wounding three of the men, a section of the New Jersey Turnpike will be closed Saturday while forensic experts reenact the shooting. A state grand jury is investigating the incident.

"People of color see racial profiling as a systematic problem that feeds on itself," says Rivera. "If police pull over more people of color because they fit a certain profile, then naturally they will tend to arrest more people of color for whatever infractions they uncover." The results of the arrests can then be used unfairly to justify the practice. Critics say this is a circular standard, and that it can be applied against any group of people police wish to target. Moreover, says Rivera, leading critics who have seen the criteria set forth in the profiles report that the descriptions are vague and inconsistent, and easily susceptible to being used unfairly.

Though racial profiling is difficult to justify, TIME Washington correspondent Elaine Shannon reports that the U.S. Customs Service faces a specific problem that racial profiling is meant to address. The major overseas drug gangs responsible for the importation of illegal drugs often use the weakest members of their own ethnic groups. "For example," says Shannon, "it is well known that Nigerian crime gangs controlling the heroin trade tend to use U.S. black or Nigerian women as their couriers." The Custom Service does not want to give up the practice of profiling or its right to stop and search African-American women. "What it needs to do," says Shannon, "is to develop procedures that ensure civility and good reason to search in each case" instead of simply treating every African-American woman as a possible criminal.