| Routine racism
The data from the New Jersey attorney general was startling: Of all the vehicles searched by New Jersey Turnpike troopers over most of the last decade, 80 percent were driven by African Americans or Latinos. "The effect of that kind of ratio over 10 years is devastating," New Jersey Attorney General John Farmer told The New York Times. "This may have been effective in law enforcement terms, but as a social policy it was a disaster." In New Jersey, 30 percent of those searches carried out on the turnpike yielded drugs or other illegal activities. But unwarranted police actions also prompted a flurry of lawsuits by minority drivers. The New Jersey attorney general's office finally conducted a review of the state police in 1999, and afterward officials publicly acknowledged that police tactics on the turnpike were discriminatory and that motorists had been singled out for stops because of their race. Facing legal action from the U.S. Department of Justice, New Jersey agreed to implement comprehensive reforms to eradicate the practice. As shocking as the situation in New Jersey is, it is just one case in a long history of racially inspired law enforcement on America's streets and highways. Long before there was "racial profiling," there was "driving while black," or DWB, the police practice of stopping dark-skinned people for no reason other than their race. "This goes back, you ask any black person. It's been going on for years," says David Harris, a professor of law and values at the University of Toledo College of Law and author of the American Civil Liberties Union report, "Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation's Highways." According to Harris, "driving while black" took off in the early eighties, as President Reagan escalated the war on drugs. To stop the flood of drugs coming into Florida, he created the Task Force on Crime in South Florida, and assigned Vice President George Bush to oversee it. In 1985, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles published a police handbook on "The Common Characteristics of Drug Couriers," which told troopers to be suspicious of drivers who wear "lots of gold," do not "fit the vehicle," and belong to "ethnic groups associated with the drug trade." Using these drug courier "profiles" became a common practice in law enforcement. When the crack epidemic struck the country in 1986, police departments began targeting poor, minority urban neighborhoods, on the presumption that drug offenders would be concentrated there. Also that year, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) launched "Operation Pipeline," which trained police officers across the country in methods of stopping vehicles to find drugs. That training, according to Harris, implicitly encouraged officers to target drivers of color. By stopping more African Americans and Latinos, police would have a better chance of catching drug dealers, so the logic went. Operation Pipeline was designed to mirror the DEA's success in using profiles to catch suspected drug couriers in airports and other transit points. But the success that state troopers had with racial profiling came at the expense of fairness, Harris says. "Blacks [and] Latinos are not more likely than whites are to be carrying dope or guns. Blacks are found at either the same or lower rates [than] whites. The same is true of Latinos." According to Harris, this debunks the argument that racial profiling is a rational law enforcement tactic. Discriminating against African Americans and other minorities has been "part of [a] general pattern of policing," Harris says. "There's hundreds of years of history to it." Nevertheless, America's war on drugs made police discrimination a science; now, officers could argue they were only following good policing procedures. Regardless of their actual effectiveness, drug courier profiles gradually became part of the routine for many highway patrols. In turn, minority motorists across the country started complaining of unwarranted stops and arrests. Once thought of as just a problem in the ghetto, DWB suddenly entered the mainstream. Middle-class and affluent African Americans were feeling the abuse; black actors like LeVar Burton, Will Smith, and Wesley Snipes, for example, were allegedly pulled over for no reason other than the color of their skin. Latinos and other minorities also accused police of singling them out. The abuses kept growing, the media started reporting extensively on the practice, and suddenly DWB was known by a new name--"racial profiling."
Routine racism |