Racial profiling and the chilling effect on law enforcement.

[sgtmac_46]

I thought I might bring this issue up and see what the other members feelings are on this issue. In recent years the topic of Racial Profiling has been a huge point of conflict in America (an issue I believe for the most part that is false). However, large amounts of mostly anecdotal evidence, coupled with a few flawed studies, has been used to attempt to paint all police officers as racists. It is not my desire to discuss whether this is a real phenomenon. The issue I want to discuss is less whether racial profiling is real, but, rather, is the entire issue creating a chilling effect on law enforcement.

Rational people understand that communities need law enforcement activity. Nobody (but a select few) dispute this fact. No one feels this direct influence more than poorer, predominantly minority communities. Lower police presence in these communities leads to more crime and violence, with the very young and the very old suffering the brunt.

The issue I want to discuss is the effect of the belief among law enforcement, given the current political environment in this country, that any accusation of racial profiling will result in the automatic condemnation of the accussed officer, whether guilty or not.

Let me illustrate how this phenomenon works in reality. Among my department, it's become a running joke of a story where in an officer observes a traffic violation. He then initiates a traffic stop on the vehicle and, upon making contact with the driver, observes that it is a minority. The officer immediately apologizes for the inconvenience and ends the traffic stop without further contact. In fact, had the officer realized it was a minority BEFORE the contact, he would not have stopped him at all. Why? Because there is a huge fear of being labelled a "racist cop" and having your file marked such, even for legitimate enforcement activity. Any allegation of racial profiling BY a motorist automatically triggers an investigation. A minority motorist who is angry for receiving a citation knows that all they have to do is say the magic words "Civil Rights Violation" and the charges against them will likely be dropped, and an investigation will begin on the officer. Even if the investigation shows the allegation to be unfounded (or especially if it does), it will likely trigger community "activists" to claim that this "investigation" merely proves that ALL police are racists, and will merely stand up for each other.

All over an enforcement activity on a traffic violation. Many officers feel it just isn't worth it, so they restrict their enforcement activity to safe groups, like white males (preferably ones without even a hint of minority status).

Is this the style of policing that the community wants. I'll be honest, this trend is a spreading phenomenon. Far from pulling people over for "DWB" (Driving while Black), many police now are refusing to even engage in enforcement activities against minorities. I, myself, will not engage in enforcement activities against minorities for anything but the most blatant and obvious offenses, and even then with trepidation. I respond with deferance to minorities when it comes to enforcement. If a minority commits a minor traffic offense, I will completely ignore it. You can expect that from a large percentage of police officers. That is the message we believe we have gotten from society, do not engage in enforcement activity against minorities, so we are responding accordingly.

So, the question is, what will the effect of this trend on criminal behavior? Will it result in a reduction of enforcement in poorer, minority communities that can ill afford to have a lower police presence.

Or, are police merely stuck in a Catch 22 whereby they CANNOT win. If they engage in enforcement activity, they are labelled as racist for arresting minorities, if they do NOT engage in enforcement activities, they are labelled as racist for not policing minority communities. What is the answer here. What do you, as Americans, want to see happen on this issue?

 

[TonyM.]

Sad state of affairs. Laws need to be applied fairly across the board. IMO another call for an elected judiciary.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Possible (not simple) solution:

Station "minority" officers in "minority" neighborhoods. Or, better yet, 2 person cars, mixed gender/ethnic base.

Now, the task of finding enouth qualified recruits alone is enormous, now we have to start playing "mix n match"...not that we already don't.

Part of this problem is the "appeasement" (sp) enviroment. The stupid idea that we somehow "owe" someone because 200 years ago his great great grandfather was a slave, or was evicted from their land.

These bogus BS lawsuits are the core of the problem. Make it so that if you bring a bogus lawsuit or claim, YOU are criminally liable. Punish the people using their race/gender/whatever as an escape clause.

 

[Phil Elmore]

Link: Profiling Does Not Violate Civil Rights

 

[modarnis]

>>I, myself, will not engage in enforcement activities against minorities for anything but the most blatant and obvious offenses, and even then with trepidation. I respond with deferance to minorities when it comes to enforcement. If a minority commits a minor traffic offense, I will completely ignore it. You can expect that from a large percentage of police officers. That is the message we believe we have gotten from society, do not engage in enforcement activity against minorities, so we are responding accordingly.>>

This whole post is so disturbing to me, not sure where to begin. Fortunately you aren't an officer in the jriisdiction where I work as a prosecutor. Ignoring traffic offenses=ignoring crime. Traffic stops find uninsured motorists, suspended licences, active arrest warrants, drugs and illegal guns. The ostrich style (bury one's head in sand to avoid conflict) of police work has no place in our society. Responsible, polite, articulate officers who enforce any observed violations in an evenhanded manner, articulate those actions in a concise report, and have the wear with all to stand behind those actions will break down the profiling myth. Unfortunately as a public official, police and prosecutors must often stand up to criticism of a variety of groups. Good police officers and prosecutors (both key pieces of the criminal justice system) need to be open fair and reasonable in dealing with their communities. At the same time they need the inner strength to make unpopular decisions about cases, and stand behind those decisions despite public outcry or media scrutiny...Why? because its the right thing to do.

 

[Tgace]

A few years ago an officer in my dept is sitting on the expressway shooting radar. A car speeds by (night time, tinted windows, cant tell who or how many are inside). He stops it and its the rapper DMX. He has a suspended license and marijuana on him. He is arrested and we get all types of accusations from the minority community that we are racist profilers. My dept. has had this problem for a while. We boarder the city of Buffalo along its primarily minority, poorer, east-side.

 

[Tgace]

The "Myth" of racial profiling. If you are really interested, these are good reads.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_3_27_02hm.html

http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_the_myth.html

 

[sgtmac_46]

>>I, myself, will not engage in enforcement activities against minorities for anything but the most blatant and obvious offenses, and even then with trepidation. I respond with deferance to minorities when it comes to enforcement. If a minority commits a minor traffic offense, I will completely ignore it. You can expect that from a large percentage of police officers. That is the message we believe we have gotten from society, do not engage in enforcement activity against minorities, so we are responding accordingly.>>

This whole post is so disturbing to me, not sure where to begin. Fortunately you aren't an officer in the jriisdiction where I work as a prosecutor. Ignoring traffic offenses=ignoring crime. Traffic stops find uninsured motorists, suspended licences, active arrest warrants, drugs and illegal guns. The ostrich style (bury one's head in sand to avoid conflict) of police work has no place in our society. Responsible, polite, articulate officers who enforce any observed violations in an evenhanded manner, articulate those actions in a concise report, and have the wear with all to stand behind those actions will break down the profiling myth. Unfortunately as a public official, police and prosecutors must often stand up to criticism of a variety of groups. Good police officers and prosecutors (both key pieces of the criminal justice system) need to be open fair and reasonable in dealing with their communities. At the same time they need the inner strength to make unpopular decisions about cases, and stand behind those decisions despite public outcry or media scrutiny...Why? because its the right thing to do.

The irony is that prosecutors are immune from many of the issues that plague law enforcement. You have the luxury of deciding which cases to prosecute and the luxury of blaming those you don't prosecute on law enforcement. Perhaps, whenever the media decides to go after prosecutors, for unfounded charges of racism you just might understand.

A little lesson on prosecutorial discretion, our county prosecutor has a case load that numbers in the hundreds, if not the thousands. He has been in office for six years. Do you know how many cases he's brought to a jury trial? 7. That's right 7. He's brought 4 felonies and 3 misdemeanors to jury trials. He has plead every other case out or out and out nullied it. When a victim becomes upset about a case being plead out the way he did, do you know what he does? He blames law enforcement. To my knowledge he has never sent anyone directly to prison. The only people who go to prison for anything are those that subsequently violate their Probation/Parole. Do you know what he has convinced the public of, however? That he has a 99% conviction rate (by virtue of his plea bargins and the fact he has never lost a jury trial)? It boggles the mind.

Far too many prosecutors live in ivory towers, you may not be one of those. But when a law enforcement officer is considered guilty by the mere charge of racism, then they start becoming more concerned with things like law suits and losing their jobs. If you don't think it's happening, and it's a growing trend, you are in for a rude awakening. You think simply being polite will shield an officer from the charge of racism? Think again. And if your numbers turn out to be skewed toward any ethnic group? Automatic sensitivity training and a mark in your file showing that your were required to attend special training for apparent bias. This has become a numbers game. The numbers stay down by having as little contact with protected races as possible. I would take what you said more seriously if you were actually charging with enforcing laws, rather than prosecuting cases that someone else made. I've worked closely with the prosecutors offices of several jurisdictions and quite frankly the job prosecutors have is pretty much cherry picked. They decide what they prosecute and don't prosecute based on what they think they can win. They don't have the responsibility of making decisions in the field that split second, and that sometimes have long term consequences. Attorneys have months to nit pick any case in front of them from every angle, and they have very few consequences resulting from anything but the most blatantly poor decisions.

I was once the object of an internal investigation involving a black gentleman who was arrested for DWI. He claimed that he was targeted because of his skin color and he claimed that I was responsible for it. The sad truth? I wasn't the officer that arrested him and I had nothing to do with the stop other than the fact that he saw me talking to the other officer to see if he needed any assistance. Why did he pick me? Because his girlfriend worked in the same place as my wife and he knew who I was to name. That was the beginning and end of my contact. A representive from the NAACP contacting my chief to attempt to file a complaint against me for some completely vague and non-specified reason. This gentleman's real motive? He thought if he threw up a smoke screen it would be easier for him to beat his DWI case. It worked too. The Prosecutor's office plea bargained with him to avoid causing too much trouble. So until I hear more prosecutors making any unpopular stand for law enforcement, i'll reserve judgement. Most prosecutors now days seem more inclined to prosecute officers first and ask questions later to appease the community.

As far as the accusation of the ostrich style of policing, I have generated more arrests for drugs and alcohol related offenses in my community than any officer at my department. I've taken pride in the philosophy that no one is above the law. However, the message i'm getting from my society is that:

"Hey, we want you to be fair and impartial, but if you are accused of racism for fair enforcement, you are guilty of it, period, and the Prosecutor, and the department, and chief, and the mayor and the city council, and everyone else that demands you do your job won't back you, even if you're right, they'll hang you out to dry for political expediency. Oh, they'll preach about 'doing the right thing' before hand and say that they'll back you, but you can forget it when the time comes".

Law enforcement is getting that message loud and clear. If that offends people, it should. Maybe it's time folks start sending a different message. Sometimes people get the enforcement they ask for.

 

[Tgace]

http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_2_the_myth.html

The allegation that police systematically single out minorities for unjustified law enforcement ultimately stands or falls on numbers. In suits against police departments across the country, the ACLU and the Justice Department have waved studies aplenty allegedly demonstrating selective enforcement. None of them holds up to scrutiny.

The typical study purports to show that minority motorists are subject to disproportionate traffic stops. Trouble is, no one yet has devised an adequate benchmark against which to measure if police are pulling over, searching, or arresting "too many" blacks and Hispanics. The question must always be: too many compared with what? Even anti-profiling activists generally concede that police pull drivers over for an actual traffic violation, not for no reason whatsoever, so a valid benchmark for stops would be the number of serious traffic violators, not just drivers. If it turns out that minorities tend to drive more recklessly, say, or have more equipment violations, you'd expect them to be subject to more stops. But to benchmark accurately, you'd also need to know the number of miles driven by different racial groups, so that you'd compare stops per man-mile, not just per person. Throw in age demographics as well: if a minority group has more young people—read: immature drivers—than whites do, expect more traffic stops of that group. The final analysis must then compare police deployment patterns with racial driving patterns: if more police are on the road when a higher proportion of blacks are driving—on weekend nights, say—stops of blacks will rise.

No traffic-stop study to date comes near the requisite sophistication. Most simply compare the number of minority stops with some crude population measure, and all contain huge and fatal data gaps. An ACLU analysis of Philadelphia traffic stops, for example, merely used the percentage of blacks in the 1990 census as a benchmark for stops made seven years later. In about half the stops that the ACLU studied, the officer did not record the race of the motorist. The study ignored the rate of traffic violations by race, so its grand conclusion of selective enforcement is meaningless.

 

[Drac]

Ignoring traffic offenses=ignoring crime. Traffic stops find uninsured motorists, suspended licences, active arrest warrants, drugs and illegal guns

Absolutly correct..Pulled down a tricked out Honda a few nights ago at about 3 am cruising around in one of more affluent developments..3 minority male occupants..The reason for the traffic stop?? Welfare check..I thought they must be lost..They couldn't give me the name or the address of the "friend" they were looking for and they seemed REAL nervious..The fact they had 4 cell phones and 4 pagers led me to believe they don't work for McDonalds..They said they stayed in Akron Ohio..I told them to stay there...

 

[sgtmac_46]

Yeah, I bought in to the whole idea of pro-active policing. I still do. Problem is, a large vocal minority of society is disagreeing with us, and increasingly, legislatures are willing to appease them. We still got Whren Vs. US, but for how much longer I don't know.

 

[Tgace]

Our ADA has been kicking consent searches because we "didnt have a reason" to ask for consent. Hello that's what "consent" means. You can search on probable cause or on consent. If I had a reason I wouldnt ask.....

 

[sgtmac_46]

Our ADA has been kicking consent searches because we "didnt have a reason" to ask for consent. Hello that's what "consent" means. You cant search on probable cause or on consent. If I had a reason I wouldnt ask.....

The whole issue is nothing but a backdoor attack on the concept of pretextual traffic stops in particular, and pro-active policing in general. The New Jersey state police, in particular, are forbidden to engage in consent searches, despite the practice being supported by case law after case law.

 

[Tgace]

We seem to be a "ticket punch" for ADA's on their way downtown to county court. Everytime I go into our DA office theres a new face...quality varies.