| It's racial profiling,
stupid
By its very nature, monitoring traffic stops by race presents statisticians with a dilemma. Should police departments trust each officer to record a driver's background truthfully and correctly? Or, in the name of accuracy, do officers ask those pulled over to state their nationality and race? Some drivers might find these questions inappropriate or intimidating. Yet these are the kind of semantic entanglements that impede any meaningful attempt at collecting data on racial profiling. "You have to ask people what their nationality is so we can keep some sort of database," Seattle Police spokesman Clam Benton told Inthefray. "Even if we had this, there would be discrepancies." In Seattle, as in many other cities, police officers take down the race and sex of criminal suspects, but they keep the information for descriptive purposes only and do not enter it into a database. Gathering such details would inconvenience citizens and police officers alike, Benton contends. Ultimately, however, the debate on how to monitor traffic stops is pointless: statistics on racial profiling--regardless of how they're collected--don't really help. The purpose of any good study is to convince people that a problem does or does not exist. But Americans are already convinced that racial profiling exists: in fact, 59 percent of those surveyed in a 1999 national Gallup poll said they believed racial profiling was "widespread." These people have experienced racial profiling themselves, have friends who have encountered it, or hear reports of racial profiling from the media. Even the legislators who support legislation to track racial profiling already know that it is prevalent. After he signed up to support the national Traffic Stops Statistics Study Act, Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, said, "We need to better understand how racial profiling is practiced so that we can stamp it out at the source." Feingold was not calling for a study to determine whether racial profiling is occurring; he was calling for a study that would help people understand how racial profiling is practiced. But what is there to understand? The police are stopping minorities regularly because of their skin color, and that is a problem. The way to fix a problem is not to study it ad nauseam, but to put forth a plan of action.
It's racial profiling, stupid |