-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
The Roots of Racial Profiling
Why are police targeting minorities for traffic stops?
By Gene Callahan and William Anderson
It is early in the morning, and the well-dressed young
African-American man driving his Ford Explorer on I-75
sees the blue lights of the Georgia State Patrol car
behind him. The officer pulls behind the sport utility
vehicle and the young man's heart begins to sink.
He is on his way to Atlanta for a job interview. The
stop, ostensibly for speeding, should not take long, he
reasons, as the highway patrol officer walks cautiously
toward the Explorer. But instead of simply asking for
a driver's license and writing a speeding ticket, the
trooper calls for backup. Another trooper soon arrives,
his blue lights flashing as well.
The young man is told to leave his vehicle, as the
troopers announce their intention to search it. Hey,
where did you get the money for something like this?
one trooper asks mockingly while he starts the process
of going through every inch of the Explorer. Soon, an
officer pulls off an inside door panel. More dismantling
of the vehicle follows. They say they are looking for
drugs, but in the end find nothing. After ticketing
the driver for speeding, the two officers casually drive
off. Sitting in his now-trashed SUV, the young man weeps
in his anger and humiliation.
Unmotivated searches like this are daily occurrences on
our nation's highways, and blacks and white liberals have
been decrying the situation for several years. Many
conservatives, on the other hand, dismiss such complaints
as the exaggerations of hypersensitive minorities. Or
they say that if traffic cops do in fact pull over and
search the vehicles of African Americans disproportionately,
then such racial profiling is an unfortunate but
necessary component of modern crime fighting.
The incident described above should give pause to those
who think that racial profiling is simply a bogus issue
cooked up by black leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson to use as another publicity tool. One of us teaches
in an MBA program that enrolls a fairly large number of
African Americans, and the story comes from one of our
students. Indeed, during class discussions, all of the
black men and many of the black women told stories of
having their late-model cars pulled over and searched for
drugs.
While incidents of racial profiling are widely deplored
today, there is little said about the actual root cause
of the phenomenon. The standard explanations for racial
profiling focus on institutional racism, but that idea
runs contrary to the sea change in social attitudes that
has taken place over the last four decades. On the contrary,
the practice of racial profiling grows from a trio of very
tangible sources, all attributable to the War on Drugs,
that $37 billion annual effort on the part of local,
state, and federal lawmakers and cops to stop the sale
and use of illicit substances. The sources include the
difficulty in policing victimless crimes in general and
the resulting need for intrusive police techniques; the
greater relevancy of this difficulty given the
intensification of the drug war since the 1980s; and the
additional incentive that asset forfeiture laws give
police forces to seize money and property from suspects.
Since the notion of scaling back, let alone stopping,
the drug war is too controversial for most politicians
to handle, it's hardly surprising that its role in racial
profiling should go largely unacknowledged.
The Practice of Racial Profiling
Although there is no single, universally accepted definition
of racial profiling, we're using the term to designate
the practice of stopping and inspecting people who are
passing through public places -- such as drivers on public
highways or pedestrians in airports or urban areas -- where
the reason for the stop is a statistical profile of the
detainee's race or ethnicity.
The practice of racial profiling has been a prominent topic
for the past several years. In his February address to
Congress, President George W. Bush reported that he'd asked
Attorney General John Ashcroft to develop specific
recommendations to end racial profiling. It's wrong, and
we will end it in America. The nomination of former New
Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman as head of the
Environmental Protection Agency was challenged on the basis
of her alleged complicity in racial profiling practices in
the Garden State. Whitman had pioneered her own unique form
of minority outreach when she was photographed frisking
a black crime suspect in 1996. Copies of the photo were
circulated to senators prior to her confirmation vote.
(By the same token, in February 1999, Whitman fired State
Police Superintendent Carl A. Williams after he gave a
newspaper interview in which he justified racial profiling
and linked minority groups to drug trafficking.) More
recently, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of
