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This article is about the opposing viewpoint of racial profiling

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The anti-"racial profiling" juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities. The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. Yet politicians are swarming on board. In February, President George W. Bush joined the rush, declaring portentously: "Racial profiling is wrong, and we will end it in America."

Too bad no one asked President Bush: "What exactly do you mean by 'racial profiling,' and what evidence do you have that it exists?" For the anti-profiling crusaders have created a headlong movement without defining their central term and without providing a shred of credible evidence that "racial profiling" is a widespread police practice.

The ultimate question in the profiling controversy is whether the disproportionate involvement of blacks and Hispanics with law enforcement reflects police racism or the consequences of disproportionate minority crime. Anti-profiling activists hope to make police racism an all but irrebuttable presumption whenever enforcement statistics show high rates of minority stops and arrests. But not so fast.

Two meanings of "racial profiling" intermingle in the activists' rhetoric. What we may call "hard" profiling uses race as the only factor in assessing criminal suspiciousness: an officer sees a black person and, without more to go on, pulls him over for a pat-down on the chance that he may be carrying drugs or weapons. "Soft" racial profiling is using race as one factor among others in gauging criminal suspiciousness: the highway police, for example, have intelligence that Jamaican drug posses with a fondness for Nissan Pathfinders are transporting marijuana along the northeast corridor. A New Jersey trooper sees a black motorist speeding in a Pathfinder and pulls him over in the hope of finding drugs.

The racial profiling debate focuses primarily on highway stops. The police are pulling over a disproportionate number of minority drivers for traffic offenses, goes the argument, in order to look for drugs. Sure, the driver committed an infraction, but the reason the trooper chose to stop him, rather than the speeder next to him, was his race.

But the profiling critics also fault both the searches that sometimes follow a highway stop and the tactics of urban policing. Any evaluation of the evidence for, and the appropriateness of, the use of race in policing must keep these contexts distinct. Highway stops should almost always be color-blind, I'll argue, but in other policing environments (including highway searches), where an officer has many clues to go on, race may be among them. Ironically, effective urban policing shows that the more additional factors an officer has in his criminal profile, the more valid race becomes-and the less significant, almost to the point of irrelevance.

Before reviewing the evidence that profiling critics offer, recall the demands that the police face every day, far from anti-police agitators and their journalist acolytes.

February 22, 2001, a town-hall meeting at P.S. 153 in Harlem between New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Harlem residents: a woman sarcastically asks Giuliani if police officers downtown are paid more than uptown officers, "because we don't have any quality of life in Harlem, none whatsoever. Drug dealers are allowed to stand out in front of our houses every day, to practically invade us, and nothing's done about it." Another woman complains that dealers are back on the street the day after being arrested, and notes that "addicts are so bold that we have to get off the sidewalk and go around them!" She calls for the declaration of a state of emergency. A man wonders if cop-basher congressman Charles Rangel, present at the meeting, could "endow the police with more power," and suggests that the NYPD coordinate with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the INS, and the IRS to bring order to the streets.

The audience meets Giuliani's assertions that the police have brought crime down sharply in Harlem with hoots of derision. No one mentions "police brutality."

Valentine's Day, 2001, a police-community meeting at Harlem's 28th Precinct: an elegant man in an angora turtleneck, tiny blue glasses, and a shadow of a goatee breaks a local taboo by asking what the precinct is doing "to address dealing on the corners." Most residents shrink from mentioning the problem at precinct meetings for fear of retaliation from dealers. A tense silence falls. The man, a restaurant investor, tells me, "If this was 59th and Park, the police wouldn't allow these individuals to hang out on the corner." He can't understand why there's no "immediate result," if the police have in fact been cracking down on drug-dealing. "I don't think it should be so hard to dismantle," he says impatiently.

February 12, 2001, the fifth floor of a hulking yellow apartment building on Lenox Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn: two officers from the 67th Precinct investigate an anonymous call reporting a group of youths smoking marijuana in the hallway. The boys have disappeared. As officers check the stairwell, a gaunt middle-aged man sporting a wildly patterned black-and-white tie courteously introduces himself as Mr. Johnson, the building superintendent. After slowly bending down to pick up a discarded cigarette butt, he asks politely if anything more can be done about the kids who come from the next building to smoke pot in his hallway.

This is the demand-often angry, sometimes wistful-that urban police forces constantly hear: get rid of the drugs! These recent appeals come after the most successful war on crime that New York City has ever conducted. A decade and a half ago, when drug-related drive-by shootings became epidemic, inner-city residents nationwide were calling even more frantically for protection from drug violence. When New Jersey, a key state on the drug corridor from Central America to New England, sent its state highway troopers to do foot patrols in Camden and Trenton, residents met them with cheers.

In New York, the mayhem eventually led to the development of the Giuliani administration's assertive policing that strives, quite successfully, to prevent crime from happening. Outside of New York, the widespread pleas to stop drug violence led the Drug Enforcement Administration to enlist state highway police in their anti-drug efforts. The DEA and the Customs Service had been using intelligence about drug routes and the typical itineraries of couriers to interdict drugs at airports; now the interdiction war would expand to the nation's highways, the major artery of the cocaine trade.

The DEA taught state troopers some common identifying signs of drug couriers: nervousness; conflicting information about origin and destination cities among vehicle occupants; no luggage for a long trip; lots of cash; lack of a driver's license or insurance; the spare tire in the back seat; rental license plates or plates from key source states like Arizona and New Mexico; loose screws or scratches near a vehicle's hollow spaces, which can be converted to hiding places for drugs and guns. The agency also shared intelligence about the types of cars that couriers favored on certain routes, as well as about the ethnic makeup of drug-trafficking organizations. A typical DEA report from the early 1990s noted that "large-scale interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians, and black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack." The 1999 "Heroin Trends" report out of Newark declared that "predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Mid-levels are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians."

According to the racial profiling crowd, the war on drugs immediately became a war on minorities, on the highways and off. Their alleged evidence for racial profiling comes in two varieties: anecdotal, which is of limited value, and statistical, which on examination proves entirely worthless.

The most notorious racial profiling anecdote may have nothing to do with racial profiling at all. On April 23, 1998, two New Jersey state troopers pulled over a van that they say was traveling at 74 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone on the New Jersey Turnpike. As they approached on foot, the van backed toward them, knocking one trooper down, hitting the patrol car, and then getting sideswiped as it entered the traffic lane still in reverse. The troopers fired 11 rounds at the van, wounding three of the four passengers, two critically.

Attorneys for the van passengers deny that the van was speeding. The only reason the cops pulled it over, critics say, was that its occupants were black and Hispanic.

If the troopers' version of the incident proves true, it is hard to see how racial profiling enters the picture. The van's alleged speed would have legitimately drawn the attention of the police. As for the shooting: whether justified or not, it surely was prompted by the possibly deadly trajectory of the van, not the race of the occupants. Nevertheless, on talk show after talk show, in every newspaper story denouncing racial profiling, the turnpike shooting has come to symbolize the lethal dangers of "driving while black."

Less notoriously, black motorists today almost routinely claim that the only reason they are pulled over for highway stops is their race. Once they are pulled over, they say, they are subject to harassment, including traumatic searches. Some of these tales are undoubtedly true. Without question, there are obnoxious officers out there, and some officers may ignore their training and target minorities. But since the advent of video cameras in patrol cars, installed in the wake of the racial profiling controversy, most charges of police racism, testified to under oath, have been disproved as lies.

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.

Only two studies, both by Temple University social psychologist John Lamberth, have attempted to create a violator benchmark. The ACLU used one to sue, successfully, the Maryland state police; a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey used the other to free 17 accused black drug traffickers. Lamberth alleged that blacks in Maryland and southern New Jersey were stopped at higher rates than their representation in the violator population would seemingly warrant. But he defined violator so broadly-in Maryland, traveling at least one mile, and in New Jersey, traveling at least six miles, over the speed limit-that he included virtually the entire driving population. Lamberth must not have spent much time talking to real cops, for his definition of violator ignores how police actually decide whom to stop. Someone gliding sedately at 56 mph in a 55 mph zone has a radically different chance of being pulled over than someone barreling along at 80. An adequate benchmark must capture the kind of driving likely to draw police attention. Despite his severely flawed methodology, Lamberth is in great demand as a racial profiling guru.

Do minorities commit more of the kinds of traffic violations that police target? This is a taboo question among the racial profiling crowd; to ask it is to reveal one's racism. No one has studied it. But some evidence suggests that it may be the case. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that blacks were 10 percent of drivers nationally, 13 percent of drivers in fatal accidents, and 16 percent of drivers in injury accidents. (Lower rates of seat-belt use may contribute to these numbers.) Random national surveys of drivers on weekend nights in 1973, 1986, and 1996 found that blacks were more likely to fail breathalyzer tests than whites. In Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist fatality rate than whites. Blacks in one New Jersey study were 23 percent of all drivers arrested at the scene of an accident for driving drunk, though only 13.5 percent of highway users. In San Diego, blacks have more accidents than their population figures would predict. Hispanics get in a disproportionate number of accidents nationally.

But though the numbers to date are incapable of telling us anything about racial profiling, that does not mean that it was not going on in some locations, at some times. Hard racial profiling in car stops-pulling over one speeder among many just because he happens to be black or Hispanic-has surely been rare. But conversations with officers in strong interdiction states such as New Jersey suggest that some troopers probably did practice soft racial profiling-pulling someone over because driver and car and direction and number and type of occupants fit the components of a courier profile.

Over time, officers' experience had corroborated the DEA intelligence reports: minorities were carrying most of the drugs. An example of the patterns they noticed: a group of young blacks with North Carolina plates traveling south out of Manhattan's Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey? Good chance they're carrying weapons and drugs, having just made a big buy in the city. Catch them northbound? Good chance they're carrying big money and guns. Some officers inevitably started playing the odds-how many, the numbers cannot yet tell us.

Despite the hue and cry, there is nothing illegal about using race as one factor among others in assessing criminal suspiciousness. Nevertheless, the initial decision to pull a car over should be based almost always on seriousness of traffic violation alone-unless, of course, evidence of other law-breaking, such as drug use, is visible. If the result is that drug couriers assiduously observe the speed limit, fine. But compared with most other policing environments, highways are relatively cueless places. In assessing the potential criminality of a driver speeding along with the pack on an eight-lane highway, an officer normally has much less to work with than on a city street or sidewalk. His locational cues-traveling on an interstate pointed toward a drug market, say-are crude, compared with those in a city, where an officer can ask if this particular block is a drug bazaar. His ability to observe the behavior of a suspect over time is limited by the speed of travel. In such an environment, blacks traveling 78 mph should not face a greater chance of getting pulled over than white speeders just because they are black and happen to be driving a car said to be favored by drug mules.

Soft racial profiling was probably not widespread enough to have influenced traffic-stop rates significantly. Nor will eliminating it quickly change the belief among many blacks that any time they get stopped for a traffic violation, it is because of their race. Nevertheless, state police commanders should eliminate any contribution that soft profiling may make to that perception, unless strong evidence emerges (as it has not so far) that soft profiling has had an extremely high success rate in drug interdiction. Far more is at stake here than the use of race in traffic stops. Specious anti-racial profiling analysis threatens to emasculate policing in areas where drug enforcement is on a far stronger basis.

The most important victory of the anti-racial profiling agitators occurred not on the traffic-stop battlefield, but on the very different terrain of the searches that sometimes follow a stop. And here is where people who care about law enforcement should really start to worry. On April 20, 1999, New Jersey's then-attorney general Peter Verniero issued his "Interim Report of the State Police Review Team Regarding Allegations of Racial Profiling." It was a bombshell, whose repercussions haven't stopped yet.

"The problem of disparate treatment [of blacks] is real, not imagined," the report famously declared. Governor Christine Todd Whitman chimed in: "There is no question that racial profiling exists at some level." The media triumphantly broadcast the findings as conclusive proof of racial profiling not just in the Garden State but nationally. The New York Times started regularly referring to New Jersey's "racial bias" on the highways as incontrovertible fact. Defense attorneys and their clients celebrated as well. "Whenever I have a state police case, I file a suppression motion . . . alleging that the stop was based on color of skin and therefore illegal," a Trenton criminal defense attorney told the New York Times. "And now guess what? The state agrees with me!"

Yet the report's influential analysis is shoddy beyond belief. Contrary to popular perception, Verniero did not reach any conclusions about racial profiling in stops. His finding of "disparate treatment" is based on the percentage of "consent searches" performed on minorities after a stop has occurred. (In a consent search, the motorist agrees to allow the trooper to search his car and person, without a warrant or probable cause.) Between 1994 and 1998, claims the report, 53 percent of consent searches on the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike involved a black person, 21 percent involved whites, and overall, 77 percent involved minorities. But these figures are meaningless, because Verniero does not include racial information about search requests that were denied, and his report mixes stops, searches, and arrests from different time periods.

But most important: Verniero finds culpable racial imbalance in the search figures without suggesting a proper benchmark. He simply assumes that 53 percent black consent searches is too high. Compared with what? If blacks in fact carry drugs at a higher rate than do whites, then this search rate merely reflects good law enforcement. If the police are now to be accused of racism every time that they go where the crime is, that's the end of public safety.

The hue and cry over the alleged New Jersey search rate makes sense only if we assume that drug trafficking is spread evenly across the entire population and that officers are unable to detect the signs of a courier once they have pulled over a car. There are powerful reasons to reject both these assumptions.

Judging by arrest rates, minorities are vastly overrepresented among drug traffickers. Blacks make up over 60 percent of arrests in New Jersey for drugs and weapons, though they are 13.5 percent of the population. Against such a benchmark, the state police search rates look proportionate.

The attorney general's report dismissed this comparison with an argument that has become de rigueur among the anti-racial profiling crowd, even in Congress: the "circularity" argument. Arrest and conviction data for drugs and weapons are virtually meaningless, said Verniero. They tell you nothing about the world and everything about the false stereotypes that guide the police. If the police find more contraband on blacks and Hispanics, that is merely because they are looking harder for it, driven by prejudiced assumptions. If the police were to target whites with as much enforcement zeal, goes this reasoning, they would find comparable levels of criminality. David Harris, a University of Toledo law school professor and the leading expert for the anti-profiling forces, makes this preposterous argument. An enforcement effort directed at 40-year-old white law professors, he assures a Senate subcommittee, would yield noticeable busts. The disproportionate minority arrests then reinforce the initial, racist stereotypes, and the vicious cycle begins all over again-too many minorities arrested, too many whites going free.

The circularity argument is an insult to law enforcement and a prime example of the anti-police advocates' willingness to rewrite reality. Though it is hard to prove a negative-in this case, that there is not a large cadre of white drug lords operating in the inner cities-circumstantial evidence rebuts the activists' insinuation. Between 1976 and 1994, 64 percent of the homicide victims in drug turf wars were black, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of FBI data. Sixty-seven percent of known perpetrators were also black. Likewise, some 60 percent of victims and perpetrators in drug-induced fatal brawls are black. These figures match the roughly 60 percent of drug offenders in state prison who are black. Unless you believe that white traffickers are less violent than black traffickers, the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rate for blacks on drug charges appears consistent with the level of drug activity in the black population. (And were it true that white dealers are less violent, wouldn't we expect police to concentrate their enforcement efforts on the most dangerous parts of the drug trade?)

The notion that there are lots of heavy-duty white dealers sneaking by undetected contradicts the street experience of just about every narcotics cop you will ever talk to-though such anecdotal evidence, of course, would fail to convince the ACLU, convinced as it is of the blinding racism that afflicts most officers. "The hard-core sellers are where the hard-core users are-places like 129th Street in Harlem," observes Patrick Harnett, retired chief of the narcotics division for the NYPD. "It's not white kids from Rockland County who are keeping black sellers in business."

The cops go where the deals are. When white club owners, along with Israelis and Russians, still dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting. Recently, however, big shipments have been going to minority neighborhoods; subsequent arrests will reflect crime intelligence, not racism.

There's not a single narcotics officer who won't freely admit that there are cocaine buys going down in the men's bathrooms of Wall Street investment firms-though at a small fraction of the amount found on 129th Street. But that is not where community outrage, such as that Mayor Giuliani heard in Harlem, is directing the police, because they don't produce violence and street intimidation.

Ultimately, the circularity argument rests on a massive denial of reality, one that is remarkably vigorous and widespread. In March, 2000, for example, New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli asserted before then-senator John Ashcroft's Judiciary Subcommittee: "Statistically it cannot bear evidence [ sic] to those who suggest, as our former superintendent of the state police suggested, that certain ethnic or racial groups disproportionately commit crimes. They do not." Needless to say, Torricelli did not provide any statistics.

The second condition necessary to explain the higher minority search rates on the highway is patrol officers' ability to detect drug trafficking. Unlike the initial decision to pull over a car, the decision to request permission to search rests on a wealth of cues. One of the most frequent is conflicting narratives among passengers and driver. "If a group in a car is carrying drugs, there will always be inconsistencies in their stories," reports Ed Lennon, head of the New Jersey Troopers Union. "It's unbelievable. A lot of times the driver won't know the passengers' first or last names-'I only know him as Bill'-or they'll get the names completely wrong. Sometimes they'll have a preplanned answer regarding their destination, but their purpose in being on the road will vary."

A driver's demeanor may also be a tip-off. "I've stopped white guys in pick-up trucks with a camper compartment on top," recalls Lennon. "Their chest is pounding; they're sweating, though it's the dead of winter. They won't look at you." And they're also hiding drugs.

Once a trooper stops a car, he can see the amount of luggage and its fit with the alleged itinerary, the accumulation of trash that suggests long stretches without stopping, the signs of drug use, the lack of a license and registration, the single key in the ignition and no trunk key, or the signs that the vehicle may have been fitted out with drug and weapon compartments. Some New York narcotics officers recently pulled over an Azusa SUV and noticed welding marks along the rain gutter on top. The occupants had raised the entire roof four inches to create a drug vault. If a car's windows don't roll all the way down, drugs may be concealed in the doors.

The fact that hit rates for contraband tend to be equal across racial groups, even though blacks and Hispanics are searched at higher rates, suggests that the police are successfully targeting dealers, not minorities. Race may play a role in that targeting, or it may not. Most cues of trafficking are race-neutral; it may be that race often correlates with the decision to search rather than causing it. But if race does play a role in the request to search, it is a much diminished one compared with a car stop based on a courier profile. When an officer has many independent indices of suspicion, adding his knowledge of the race of major trafficking groups to the mix is both legitimate and not overly burdensome on law-abiding minorities.

Amazingly, Attorney General Verniero acknowledges that the police merely try to maximize their hit rates in deciding whom to search, but he blames them for doing so. "The state police reward system gave practical impetus to the use of these inappropriate stereotypes about drug dealers" by rewarding big busts, he frets. But if the police were seeking to maximize their contraband yields, and the alleged "inappropriate stereotypes" were not helping them do so, presumably they would abandon those "stereotypes" and find some other set of cues-unless, of course, they were merely out to harass minorities for the thrill of it. But in that case, their hit rates would be lower for minorities than for whites, which they were not.

The bottom line is this: the New Jersey attorney general has branded the state police as racist without a scintilla of analysis for his finding. Yet New Jersey is the wave of the future, for racial profiling data-collection initiatives are sweeping the country. At least 30 states could soon require their state police to collect racial data on all traffic stops and searches, with the stated end of eliminating "racial profiling." Urban forces are under identical pressure. Virtually every major law-enforcement organization opposes these bills, because of their failure to deal with the benchmarking problem. Until someone devises an adequately sophisticated benchmark that takes into account population patterns on the roads, degrees of law-breaking, police deployment patterns, and the nuances of police decision making, stop data are as meaningless as they are politically explosive. Attorney General John Ashcroft has encouraged these data-gathering initiatives; he should instead withhold his support, unless local proponents can prove that they will capture the complex realities of law enforcement.

Unfortunately, the flurry of racial profiling analysis is not confined to the highways. It will wreak the most havoc on urban policing. Despite the racket by protesters, it is in city policing that race probably plays its least significant role, because officers have so many other cues from the environment. In assessing whether a pedestrian is behaving suspiciously, for example, they might already know that he is at a drug corner, about which they have received numerous complaints. They know if there has been a string of burglaries in the neighborhood. As they observe him, they can assess with whom he is interacting, and how.

A New York Street Crime Unit sergeant in Queens describes having stopped white pedestrians who had immediately changed directions as soon as they saw his unmarked car or ducked into an alley or a store for eight seconds and then looked for him once they came out. The night I spoke to him, he was patrolling the 102nd Precinct in Woodhaven, a largely white and Hispanic neighborhood. He had earlier questioned a white kid hanging out in front of a factory. "He was breaking his neck looking back at us; we thought he was a burglar." It turns out he was waiting for a friend. Another night in another precinct, the sergeant saw two black kids on bikes. "One guy's arm was hanging straight down, like he was carrying a gun. When they saw us, the other guy took off on his bike and threw a bag away. It was felony-weight drugs." Are you ignoring whites with guns? I asked him. "Of course not; I could see the same thing tonight," he said impatiently. "I don't use race at all. The only question is: are you raising my level of suspicion? Fifteen minutes after a stop, I may not even be able to tell you the color of the guy."

Even car stops on city streets usually have more context than on a highway. "If we pass four or five guys in a car going the opposite direction," explains the Queens sergeant, "and they're all craning their necks to see if we notice them, we may reverse and follow them for a while. We won't pull them over, but our suspicion is up. We'll run their plates. If the plates don't check out, they're done. If they commit a traffic violation, we won't pull everyone out of the car yet; we'll just interview the driver. If he doesn't have paperwork, it may be a stolen car. Now everyone's coming out to be frisked."

Hard as it is to believe, criminals actually do keep turning around to look at officers, though it would seem an obvious give-away. "Thank God they're stupid, or we'd be out of a job," the sergeant laughs.

But urban policing depends on another race-neutral strength: it is data-driven. The greatest recent innovation in policing was New York's Compstat, the computer-generated crime analysis that allows police commanders to pinpoint their enforcement efforts, then allows top brass to hold them accountable for results. If robberies are up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the precinct commander will strategically deploy his officers to find the perpetrators. Will all the suspects be black? Quite likely, for so is the neighborhood. Does that mean that the officers are racist? Hardly; they are simply going where the crime is. In most high-crime neighborhoods, race is wholly irrelevant to policing, because nearly all the residents are minorities.

Urban police chiefs worry about the data-collection mania as much as highway patrol commanders do. Ed Flynn, chief of police for Virginia's Arlington County, explains why. Last year, the black community in his jurisdiction was demanding heavier drug enforcement. "We had a series of community meetings. The residents said to us: 'Years ago, you had control over the problem. Now the kids are starting to act out again.' They even asked us: 'Where are your jump-out squads [who observe drug deals from their cars, then jump out and nab the participants]?' " So Flynn and his local commander put together an energetic strategy to break up the drug trade. They instituted aggressive motor-vehicle checks throughout the problem neighborhood. Cracked windshield, too-dark windows, expired tags, driving too fast? You're getting stopped and questioned. "We wanted to increase our presence in the area and make it quite unpleasant for the dealers to operate," Flynn says. The Arlington officers also cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like public urination, and used undercover surveillance to take out the dealers.

By the end of the summer, the department had cleaned up the crime hot spots. Community newsletters thanked the cops for breaking up the dealing. But guess what? Says Flynn: "We had also just generated a lot of data showing 'disproportionate' minority arrests." The irony, in Flynn's view, is acute. "We are responding to heartfelt demands for increased police presence," he says. "But this places police departments in the position of producing data at the community's behest that can be used against them."

The racial profiling analysis profoundly confuses cause and effect. "Police develop tactics in response to the disproportionate victimization of minorities by minorities, and you are calling the tactics the problem?" Flynn marvels.

However much the racial profilers try to divert attention away from the facts of crime, those facts remain obdurate. Arlington has a 10 percent black population, but robbery victims identify nearly 70 percent of their assailants as black. In 1998, blacks in New York City were 13 times more likely than whites to commit a violent assault, according to victim reports. As long as those numbers remain unchanged, police statistics will also look disproportionate. This is the crime problem that black leaders should be shouting about.

But the politics of racial profiling has taken over everything else. Here again, New Jersey is a model of profiling pandering, and it foreshadows the irrationality that will beset the rest of the country. In February 1999, New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman peremptorily fired the head of the state police, Colonel Carl Williams, whose reputation for honesty had earned him the nickname "The Truth." It was the truth that got him fired. The day before his dismissal, Williams had had the temerity to tell a newspaper reporter that minority groups dominate the cocaine and marijuana trade.

Of course, this information had constituted the heart of DEA reports for years. No matter. Stating it publicly violated some collective fairy tale that all groups commit drug crimes at equal rates. Whitman's future political career depended on getting Williams's head, and she got it. One scapegoat was not enough, however. The New Jersey state troopers who shot at the van are now on trial for attempted murder-a wildly trumped-up charge-and the attorney general has been prosecuting the case in a flagrantly political fashion.

One way to make sure that nasty confrontations with the facts about crime don't happen again is to stop publishing those facts. And so the New Jersey state police no longer distribute a typical felony-offender profile to their officers, because such profiles may contribute, in the attorney general's words, to "inappropriate stereotypes" about criminals. Never mind that in law enforcement, with its deadly risk, more information is always better than less. Expect calls for the barring of racial information from crime analysis to spread nationally.

The New Jersey attorney general's office has also dropped its appeal of a devastating 1996 trial court decision that had declared the state police guilty of "institutional racism." Using Lamberth's New Jersey traffic study as proof of racial profiling, the court dismissed drug indictments against 17 blacks without so much as glancing at the facts of their cases. The court was wrong on the evidence and wrong on the law, but the case now stands permanently on the books as the most important judicial decision to date on racial profiling.

Next, the New Jersey attorney general himself dismissed en masse drug and weapons charges against 128 defendants. The defendants all alleged that state troopers had pulled them over merely because of race. The attorney general was not willing to defend the state's officers and so let the defendants go free. In one case, the defendants' car allegedly passed a marked cruiser at 75 miles an hour; the occupants were openly smoking pot and drinking; the trooper found cocaine-hardly a case of racial profiling, hard or soft. Numerous requests to the attorney general's office for comment on the case have gone unanswered.

New Jersey will soon monitor the length of traffic stops that individual officers make and correlate it to the race of the motorist. It will also monitor by race the computer checks that individual officers run on license plates, on the theory that racist officers will spend more time bothering innocent black motorists and will improperly target them for background checks. Of course an officer's stop and arrest data will be closely scrutinized for racial patterns as well. And if in fact such investigatory techniques correlate with race because more minorities are breaking the law? Too bad for the cop. He will be red-flagged as a potential racist.

These programs monitoring individual officers are present in all jurisdictions that, like New Jersey, operate under a federal monitor. Along with the new state requirements for racial data collection on a department-wide basis, they will destroy assertive policing, for they penalize investigatory work. The political classes are telling police officers that if they have "too many" enforcement interactions with minorities, it is because they are racists. Officers are responding by cutting back enforcement. Drug arrests dropped 55 percent on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey in 2000, and 25 percent on the turnpike and parkway combined. When the mayor and the police chief of Minneapolis accused Minneapolis officers of racial profiling, traffic stops dropped 63 percent. Pittsburgh officers, under a federal consent decree monitoring their individual enforcement actions, now report that they are arresting by racial quota. Arrests in Los Angeles, whose police department has been under fire from the Justice Department, dropped 25 percent in the first nine months of 2000, while homicides jumped 25 percent.

The Harlem residents who so angrily demanded more drug busts from Mayor Giuliani last February didn't care about the race of the criminals who were destroying their neighborhood. They didn't see "black" or "white." They only saw dealers-and they wanted them out. That is precisely the perspective of most police officers as well; their world is divided into "good people" and "bad people," not into this race or that.

If the racial profiling crusade shatters this commonality between law-abiding inner-city residents and the police, it will be just those law-abiding minorities who will pay the heaviest price.

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The anti-"racial profiling" juggernaut must be stopped, before it obliterates the crime-fighting gains of the last decade, especially in inner cities. The anti-profiling crusade thrives on an ignorance of policing and a willful blindness to the demographics of crime. Yet politicians are swarming on board. In February, President George W.

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This article talks about about racial and Incidents that happened.

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On April 12, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson entered a Philadelphia Starbucks to meet with a business partner. But after waiting less than 10 minutes for him, they found themselves surrounded by police, facing charges of trespassing and creating a disturbance.

Their crime? Asking to use the restroom and sitting inside before placing an order.

That was all it took for the store's manager to call the police, telling a 911 dispatcher that there were "two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave." Police arrived shortly thereafter, and the two men, both black, were put in handcuffs.

Robinson later told Good Morning America that his first thought when he saw the police officers was, "They can't be here for us." Nelson told the Associated Press that he feared for his life.

"Anytime I'm encountered by cops, I can honestly say it's a thought that runs through my mind," Nelson added. "You never know what's going to happen."

What happened to Nelson and Robinson, and the social media outcry that followed, prompted Starbucks to shut down all 8,000 company-owned stores fora day of anti-bias training. Beyond that, the incident began a wave of stories sharing a common framework: A black or brown person, doing something innocuous or nothing at all, prompts a suspiciouswhite person tocall the police.

It's created a seemingly endless stream of stories involving calls to police or 911 on people of color: A black child who mowed part of the wrong yard, a black family eating at Subway, an 8-year-old girl selling bottled water, a woman using the private pool in her gated community, a trio of filmmakers staying in an Airbnb, or a group of black women on a golf course. These are just some examples of a person or group being forced to defend their presence.

These stories and othershavebeenpublished so frequently that they've formed a new news genre: "Living While Black," a phrase that encompasses the myriad ways black people are viewed with suspicion, profiled, and threatened with responses from police for minor infractions, or less.

Collectively, they illustrate the ways people of color are subjected to arbitrary social expectations, and how violating those expectations is punishable. Decades after the collapse of legal segregation, they also show that spaces like clothing stores, coffee shops, neighborhoods, and universities remain strongly controlled along racial lines.

In many ways, the recent wave of Living While Black incidents highlights issues that go beyond the circumstances that fuel any single story. They speak to the intensification of racial tension in a political climate that has emboldened whites frustrated with a perceived loss of power and fueled fear and anxiety in communities of color.

The incidents also speak to the persistence of residential segregation and isolation, particularly of whites, and how that isolation simultaneously maintains and heightens white mistrust of nonwhite groups. And with many of these calls leading to requests for police intervention, they highlight the use of law enforcement to "manage" the behavior of African Americans. That's fraught with menace because of the racial disparities in police use of force that make people of color more likely to encounter violence or harassment.

Much like the rise of Black Lives Matter and the videos of police violence that accompanied it, Living While Black offers evidence in real time that America is still grappling with long-held racial divisions. As the incidents continue, the deluge of footage is sparking a discussion about race and racism that focuses on the ways individual behavior can play into larger acts of systemic racism. It's an important discussion driven by unfortunate circumstances. But it's also a very old issue.

Racial profiling isn't new, but Living While Black is calling new attention to it

At its core, Living While Black is about racial profiling, the concept that a person's race or ethnicity makes them an object of suspicion and heightened scrutiny from law enforcement. From the use of slave patrols to lynching to legal segregation, and in modern iterations like stop and frisk, racial profilinghas long been used to maintain white authority by singling out the presence and behavior of people of color - especially African Americans - as requiring punishment. These systems rely on the participation of bystanders and observers to alert authorities to those deemed "suspicious."

So on one hand, what we are seeing now isn't new. After all, it hasn't even been 10 years since well-known Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was accused of breaking into his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and charged with disorderly conduct when he protested.

But the current Living While Black incidents - captured on video and spread on social media - do make it easier for the broader public to see these calls to police. This phenomenon is similar to the spread of video documenting police violence and misconduct. By putting these incidents on camera, they serve as evidence, providing a digital record for those affected by profiling and a way of alerting a wider audience to the ways in which black behavior continues to be criminalized and subject to policing.

Robin DiAngelo, a sociologist and the author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, says these videos make it much more difficult for white people to deny that profiling has occurred. "These incidents have always happened, but white people do not always believe it because it doesn't happen to us," DiAngelo told me. "The only real difference we have now is that we are able to record it in a way that makes it undeniable."

In doing so, the incidents highlight just how quickly a misplaced assumption or feeling uncomfortable can lead a white person to call the police. They also show how black people are continually asked to justify their presence in spaces where they are seen as not being the norm.

Take, for example, the story of Lolade Siyonbola, a black graduate student at Yale who woke from a nap in a dorm common room in May to questions from police. A white classmate had called 911, saying that she wasn't sure if Siyonbola belonged in the dorm. When police officers arrived, Siyonbola unlocked her dorm room to prove her residence, but she was still asked for ID.

"I deserve to be here. I pay tuition like everybody else," Siyonbola told police officers in a video posted to Facebook. "I'm not going to justify my existence here."

The request to "justify my existence," and the frustration that this sort of request creates, lies at the core of these incidents. Academics have noted that people of color, especially black people, are often asked to provide justification and proof when they enter spaces where they are in the minority. Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson explains that there is a difference between "white spaces," where black people are often not present or exist in a limited number, and "black spaces," communities and spaces occupied by larger numbers of black people.

Anderson notes that commonly held stereotypes of black people as being criminal and black behavior as being deviant strongly shape how they are viewed by others. As a result, black people in these "white spaces" are forced to justify their presence, and face consequences when that justification isn't accepted by others.

"In the minds of many of their detractors, to scrutinize and stop black people is to prevent crime and protect the neighborhood," he explained in "The White Space," a 2015 paper published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. "Thus, for the black person, particularly young males, virtually every public encounter results in a degree of scrutiny that a 'normal,' white person would certainly not need to endure."

Research has shown that black people are often subjected to heightened scrutiny and suspicion, which begins in childhood. In 2014, researcher Phillip Goff found that by the age of 10, black boys begin to be seen as less innocent than their white peers. And a Georgetown study released in 2017 found that black girls as young as 5 are already perceived as more adult-like and less innocent than white girls of the same age.

It tracks with other data examining attitudes about race. A series of studies published by the American Psychological Association in 2017 have shown that black men are more often associated with violence than white men, and a 2015 study from researchers at the University of California Los Angeles found that just mentioning a "black-sounding" name is enough to conjure a mental image that is larger and more threatening than a "white-sounding" one.

It's likely that the Living While Black incidents we hear about now reflect this sort of implicit, fear-driven, stereotype-laden thinking. But these incidents may also point to something else - like a more explicit desire to preserve racial hierarchies by casting people of color as deviants who can be removed at any moment.

In the US, "black people have only had dominion over their own bodies for a very short period of time," DiAngelo said. These incidents, she said, suggest "that your body still doesn't belong to you. That this is MY space, MY body, MY park."

How Living While Black collides with policing

If the recent spate of incidents has sparked a conversation about why black people are met with so much suspicion in public, it's important to ask why callers want police to respond to situations where they aren't really needed.

The argument here is that when people call law enforcement for unnecessary reasons, they are adding to an existing problem, since minority groups are more likely to face police violence or harsh punishment from the justice system.

You don't need to look far for examples of how this can quickly take a turn for the worse. In 2015, white residents in McKinney, Texas, called police with a noise complaint against a group of black high schoolers holding a pool party. One adult allegedly told the teenagers to return to "Section 8 [public] housing." When police arrived, a black girl was violently slammed to the ground and pinned by an officer. Residents later posted signs thanking the officers for "keeping us safe."

In 2014, John Crawford was fatally shot by police inside an Ohio Walmart after a man called 911, telling the dispatcher that Crawford was pointing a gun at people. Crawford was holding a BB gun, and video footage later showed that he was not brandishing the weapon.

In early July, four black teenagers were detained by Minnesota police officers, including one officer who drew his weapon, after a woman called the police saying that the boys had knives and assaulted a white man in the park. The call was quickly shown to be false after police found no weapons.

Data from the Department of Justice has shown that people of color call the police less often than white people. Experts note that this difference is driven by a crucial perception: While white people see police as a force that will protect them, communities of color see a force that is more likely to do the opposite.

There's a real reason for that. In addition to studies that reveal racial disparities in police use of force, data collected by the Guardian shows that black Americans are more likely than whites to be shot by police, when controlling for population.

High-profile incidents of police violence can further erode trust in law enforcement, and that trust can be difficult to regain. A 2016 study from a group of sociologists at Yale, Harvard, and Oxford found that after the 2004 police beating of Frank Jude in Milwaukee, residents made 17 percent fewer 911 calls the next year. And those numbers remained low even after the officers involved in the incident had been punished. Researchers found similar results after high-profile incidents of police brutality in other predominantly blackcommunities. Those changes didn't happen in white communities.

A deterioration in trust can happen even when a fatal police shooting isn't involved. In 2013, political scientists Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver examinedthe potential effects 311 non-emergency calls have on communities. Analyzing some 3 million 311 call records and 1.2 million police stops in New York City, they found that many of these calls, which are usually used to lodge complaints about minor issues like noise disturbances, were more likely to occur in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

While 311 data does not include information about the race of the caller, a recent report from BuzzFeed found that census tracts in gentrifying parts of New York City yielded more 311 calls than non-gentrifying ones, suggesting that these calls increase when the white population in a neighborhood increases.

Lerman and Weaver noted that how police handled these cases had a significant effect on perceptions of local institutions. "When police search a higher number of citizens or deploy more force in their stops of community members, people become much less likely" to interact with their local government. "Thus, the relationship turns on the quality of policing, not merely the quantity."

Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law and the author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men, told me that one reason unnecessary 911 calls are so dangerous is that they put African Americans in unnecessary interactions with law enforcement. "When the police are called on African Americans, it has a very negative impact on those black people, even if they are not arrested, or beat up, or killed," he said. "You're required to justify your existence and your presence in a white space. It makes you feel like less of a citizen and less of a human being. It's impossible to overstate the adverse consequences."

Beyond the personal ramifications, these incidents can also affect a broader community. "The gulf between how black America and white America experience the police is vast," Weaver, a researcher who examined 311 calls and now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote for Vox in May. She pointed to a dynamic where black communities often struggle to get police to respond to calls for assistance, while white Americans continue to see police as worth calling due to their high response rates.

"Black people need to be able to trust that when they enlist the police, they get what whites get - police who show up, take their concerns seriously, and don't further victimize or retaliate against the citizen," she added.

The tensions in this phenomenon reveal anxiety among white people

Living While Black is, of course, taking place in a wider context. Four years ago, Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives sparked a national conversation about race and policing that laid the groundwork for the use of video and social media seen in Living While Black and increased knowledge of how policing affects black communities. But this newwave of videos is getting so much attention as heightened concerns about the treatment of immigrant communities, the rise of emboldened white supremacists, and an increase in hate crimes share the spotlight.

The story of Living While Black isn't just about black people. It's also about white people, their anxieties, and what that anxiety means for black people simply trying to navigate daily life.

Polling shows that white people's thoughts about race aren't accurate. They are overly optimistic about the progress of other groups; a 2017 Yale study, for example, found that white Americans dramatically overestimate the level of economic equality between black and white people, and other forms of racial equality in the US.

Polling also shows that whites believe they faceas much, or even more discrimination than black Americans and other racial groups. In fact, according to a 2016 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 57 percent of whites and 66 percent of those identified as "white working class" in the poll, said that "discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities." A recent PRRI study found that roughly one-third of Americans and half of Republicans believe America's growing racial diversity will have a negative impact on American society.

Perhaps it's because many of those within this group are experiencing the feeling of being left behind, in part, because of the slow steady ascension of people of color. Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist and author of Strangers in Their Own Land, describes certain white Americans as feeling like they are standing in line that leads up a hill toward the endpoint, prosperity. But faced with globalization and income stagnation, they see marginalized people "cutting" the line with the help of programs like affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws. This also introduces more black and brown people into previously white-only spaces.

As Yale psychologist Jennifer Richeson recently told Vox's Ezra Klein, this zero-sum framing can play a powerful role in whites' political behavior, even if it doesn't acknowledge that whites as a group still hold significant societal advantages. It isn't much of a stretch to suggest that these attitudes likely fuel heightened distrust and animosity toward people of color. These anxieties, cranked up to an extreme in declarations that racial progress would result in so-called "white genocide," create an even more dire perception of nonwhites and the way demographic change is affecting the country.

But there's another issue here too: Whites are rarely discussed as a racial group. In fact, as Vox's David Roberts noted recently, the very act of referring to white Americans as "white people" is enough to cause frustration, potentially because it serves as a reminder that whites also carry a racial identity.

That failure to truly grapple with race helps reinforce a defensive understanding of race and its continued consequences. It's part of why so many of the people calling police on a black person react to criticism with a simple response: "I'm not a racist."

Take, for example, Linda Krakora, an Ohio woman whose husband called police after Reggie Fields, a black 12-year-old, mowed a small patch of their grass. When a Facebook video of the incident when viral, Krakora quickly defended herself and her family from accusations of racism, noting that she lived in a predominantly black community.

Another example lies in McKinney, the site of the aforementioned pool party in 2015. When the Atlantic's Olga Khazan visited the town this year, she noted that several community members openly declined to discuss the incident. Those who did were often defensive when questioned about the role that race might have played in the encounter. "[Police] were called not because there were black people in the pool," George Fuller, the mayor of McKinney, told Khazan. "They came ... because there were people trespassing, destroying property, and smoking dope." (Khazan noted that police reports and 911 calls from the incident made no mention of drugs.)

DiAngelo told me that these defenses posit a "good-bad binary," a framing that positions racism as an intentional act exclusively done by bad people. "It exempts virtually all white people from the system that we're in," she said. "As long as we think nice people can't be racist, we're going to protect the system."

That failure to acknowledge the depths and breadth of racism also makes it harder to acknowledge the ways that nonwhite groups are exposed to harm by actions like calling the police. In the short term, the problem highlighted by Living While Black can be solved by white people calling the police less. But addressing the underlying issues will require much more than that.

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Living While Black and the criminalization of blackness

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On April 12, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson entered a Philadelphia Starbucks to meet with a business partner. But after waiting less than 10 minutes for him, they found themselves surrounded by police, facing charges of trespassing and creating a disturbance. Their crime? Asking to use the restroom and sitting inside before placing an order.

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This video talks about how police could do better and improve their city and towns.

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What You Can Do Right Now To Improve Policing In Your City

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Everybody is a different color but we are the same.

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This shows how the colored person thereś a police.On the white person side thereś none.

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This photo is trying to say that this is how police target people in general.

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This photo shows your color of skin doesn´t mean automacitaly your a criminal

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This articles talks about police racial profiling

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The #BlackLivesMatter movement has sparked nationwide protests and has raised awareness worldwide about the unequal treatment of black people by police in the United States.

Listening to the voices from the movement - and learning from the death of Eric Garner and the series of other deaths of unarmed black men - it's clear that two issues need to be addressed: racial profiling and police use of excessive force. Both run afoul of the U.S. Constitution, but remain common practices in law enforcement, too often with tragic results.

In Garner's case, for example, police targeted him for the petty crime of selling loose cigarettes - the types of crimes black people are targeted for at higher rates - and then attempted to arrest him with a chokehold, banned by the department. Whatever else we have learned from the recent tragedies of police violence, it is clear that we need comprehensive federal, state and local policies that outlaw racial profiling and rein in police excessive force.

Racial profiling - as well as profiling based on religion, ethnicity and national origin - continues to plague our nation despite the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law. In a 2011 report, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights found evidence of widespread racial profiling, showing that African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be stopped and searched by police, even though they're less likely to be found possessing contraband or committing a criminal act. In Illinois, for example, black and Hispanic drivers were twice as likely to be searched after a traffic stop compared to white drivers, but white drivers were twice as likely to have contraband. The NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk program shows similar evidence of racial profiling, with police targeting blacks and Latinos about 85 percent of the time. In nearly nine out of 10 searches, police find nothing.

Likewise, excessive force by police persists despite the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. In lawsuits and investigations, the U.S. Department of Justice has concluded that a number of major police departments have engaged in a pattern or practice of excessive force. The Cleveland Police Department was most recently found to be an offender, but it follows a long line of other wayward law enforcement agencies: Seattle, New Orleans, Portland, Newark and Albuquerque among them. Clearly, cases like Eric Garner's are not isolated - police use of excessive force is a systemic, national problem. The DOJ has recommended revising and clarifying local policies regarding appropriate uses of force, improving officer training and supervision, and implementing rigorous internal accountability systems, among other things. But recommendations are not enough. Conquering this systemic issue demands a national mandate.

Profiling undermines public safety and strains police-community trust. When law enforcement officers target residents based on race, religion or national origin rather than behavior, crime-fighting is less effective and community distrust of police grows. A study of the Los Angeles Police Department showed that minority communities that had been unfairly targeted in the past continue to experience greater mistrust and fear of police officers. To root out this ineffective tactic that undermines public confidence, we need stronger policies against racial profiling at all levels - from local to federal - as well as more effective training and oversight of police officers, and systems of accountability.

Twenty states have no laws prohibiting racial profiling by law enforcement, according to an NAACP report released in September. Among states that do, the policies vary widely in implementation and effectiveness. Only 17 of those states require data collection on all police stops and searches, and only 15 require analysis and publication of other racial profiling data. Limited and inconsistent data collection makes it impossible to devise effective remedies for racial profiling.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a newly revised guide on use of profiling by law enforcement, distinguishing between legitimate uses (such as using race and other characteristics in a suspect description) and illegitimate uses (such as criminal stereotypes). Among other things, the guide explains that uses of race and other characteristics should be based on particularized and trustworthy information relevant to the specific investigation, rather than generalized stereotypes. The policy also provides general provisions on training, data collection and accountability, and it was expanded to include national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Civil rights groups have been calling for this updated guide for years.

However, the Department of Justice did not address all concerns. Civil rights advocates had also called for the elimination of loopholes for national security and border enforcement, which the DOJ did not adopt. The document states:

This Guidance does not apply to Federal non-law enforcement personnel, including U.S. military, intelligence, or diplomatic personnel, and their activities. In addition, this Guidance does not apply to interdiction activities in the vicinity of the border, or to protective, inspection, or screening activities.

The DOJ policy, however, is far clearer and stronger than policies held by many states and localities. As the NAACP found, some states and localities ban the use of pretextual traffic stops, others explicitly prohibit racial profiling, and still others require mandatory data collection - but few contain all of the elements of an effective racial profiling ban, and many states lack profiling laws altogether. Since Americans encounter local police in far greater numbers than any federal law enforcement officers, the adoption of state and local laws and policies banning profiling is critical.

Excessive force and racial profiling are two destructive modes of police misconduct that require concerted, vigilant action to reduce and eliminate. While racial profiling can end in tragic police killings of unarmed individuals, such as with Eric Garner or Michael Brown, it also results in many unnecessary stops and searches, harassment and intimidation, and even confiscation of property without due process. The steps to curb this are clear: At all levels of government, we need definitive anti-profiling laws and policies, training of officers on the elimination of explicit and implicit bias, data collection on traffic stops and other police-community contacts, and development of internal and external accountability systems. With these efforts, police departments across the country can rebuild public trust and ensure that policing methods reinforce rather than undermine our democratic values.
More from PostEverything: Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. There's only one fix. What caused the Ferguson riot exists in so many other cities, too Filming the police is the American thing to do

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Racial profiling has destroyed public trust in police. Cops are exploiting our weak laws against it.

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The #BlackLivesMatter movement has sparked nationwide protests and has raised awareness worldwide about the unequal treatment of black people by police in the United States. Listening to the voices from the movement - and learning from the death of Eric Garner and the series of other deaths of unarmed black men - it's clear that two issues need to be addressed: racial profiling and police use of excessive force.

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This photo shows that other races and nationalities aren't all bad.

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This article talks about racial profiling with other races and not just one.

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"Racial Profiling" refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Criminal profiling, generally, as practiced by police, is the reliance on a group of characteristics they believe to be associated with crime. Examples of racial profiling are the use of race to determine which drivers to stop for minor traffic violations (commonly referred to as "driving while black or brown"), or the use of race to determine which pedestrians to search for illegal contraband.

Another example of racial profiling is the targeting, ongoing since the September 11th attacks, of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians for detention on minor immigrant violations in the absence of any connection to the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.

Law enforcement agent includes a person acting in a policing capacity for public or private purposes. This includes security guards at department stores, airport security agents, police officers, or, more recently, airline pilots who have ordered passengers to disembark from flights, because the passengers' ethnicity aroused the pilots' suspicions. Members of each of these occupations have been accused of racial profiling.

Racial profiling does not refer to the act of a law enforcement agent pursuing a suspect in which the specific description of the suspect includes race or ethnicity in combination with other identifying factors.

Defining racial profiling as relying "solely" on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin or religion can be problematic. This definition found in some state racial profiling laws is unacceptable, because it fails to include when police act on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin or religion in combination with an alleged violation of all law. Under the "solely" definition, an officer who targeted Latino drivers who were speeding would not be racial profiling because the drivers were not stopped "solely" because of their race but also because they were speeding. This would eliminate the vast majority of racial profiling now occurring.

Any definition of racial profiling must include, in addition to racially or ethnically discriminatory acts, discriminatory omissions on the part of law enforcement as well. For example, during the eras of lynching in the South in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's, southern sheriffs sat idly by while racists like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized African Americans. At times, the sheriffs would even release black suspects to the lynch mobs. A recent example would be the complaint by an African American man in Maryland, who after moving into a white community, was attacked and subjected to property damage. Local police failed to respond to his repeated complaints until they arrested him for shooting his gun into the air, trying to disperse a hostile mob outside his home.

Many racial profiling victims walk away with traffic tickets, but too often for others the outcome of racial profiling is death.

Pennsylvania (Brentwood) - On October 12, 1995, Jonny Gammage, a 31 year-old African American male, was killed after being pulled over while driving the Jaguar of his cousin, Pittsburgh Steelers football player Ray Seals, in a predominately white community. Although police claimed that Gammage initiated the struggle, a tow truck driver said he saw one officer start the fight and the others join in kicking, hitting and clubbing Gammage while he lay on the pavement. Three officers were tried for involuntary manslaughter: John Vojtas was acquitted; Lt. Milton Mulholland and Michael Albert had their charges dismissed after two mistrials. Gammage's family settled a wrongful death civil rights lawsuit against the five officers involved and their police departments for $1.5 million.

New York (Bronx-New York City) - On February 4, 1999, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 22 year-old immigrant from New Guinea, West Africa, was shot and killed in the narrow vestibule of the apartment building where he lived. Four white officers, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy fired 41 bullets, hitting Diallo 19 times. All four were members of the New York City Police Department's Street Crimes Unit, which, under the slogan, "We Own the Night," used aggressive "stop and frisk" tactics against African Americans at a rate double that group's population percentage. A report on the unit by the state attorney general found that blacks were stopped at a rate 10 times that of whites, and that 35 percent of those stops lacked reasonable suspicion to detain or had reports insufficiently filled out to make a determination. Thousands attended Diallo's funeral. Demonstrations were held almost daily, along with the arrests of over 1,200 people in planned civil disobedience. In a trial that was moved out of the community where Diallo lived and to Albany in upstate New York, the four officers who killed Diallo were acquitted of all charges.

Ohio (Cincinnati) - On April 7, 2001, in the early morning hours, Timothy Thomas, a 19 year-old African-American, was shot to death by police officer John Roach. Thomas had 14 outstanding misdemeanor warrants, mostly traffic violations, including failure to wear a seat belt. According to a city councilman, he was running away, holding up his baggy pants, and scaled a fence, landing in a driveway where Roach was approaching and shot Thomas. He became the fifth black male in the city to die at the hands of police in a five-month period and the fifteenth since 1995. Two nights of protests left broken windows at City Hall and fires around the city. Witnesses reported that following Thomas' funeral, six city SWAT team officers shot pellet-filled bags into a peaceful crowd. Two people hit by the pellets filed lawsuits. Under community and city council pressure, both the public safety director and city manager resigned. Officer Roach was indicted on charges of negligent homicide, and obstructing official business, resulting from differences in his version of events.

Roach was acquitted in a bench trial characterized by the judge's (a former prosecutor) open admiration for Roach, and blaming Timothy Thomas for "making" Roach kill him.

A community coalition, the Cincinnati Black United Front and the ACLU of Ohio filed suit against the city and the Fraternal Order of Police, citing a pattern and practice of discrimination by police, including issuing the type of traffic citations Thomas received to African Americans at twice their population percentage. In April 2002 the case was settled, under terms including the establishment of a civilian complaint review board and the activation of the reporting of collected traffic stop data that had been enacted by city ordinance in 2001. The Department of Justice also intervened and settled with the city, including revision and review of use of force policy.

It is significant to note that research confirms the existence of bias in decisions to shoot. A series of University of California/University of Chicago studies recreated the experience of a police officer confronted with a potentially dangerous suspect, and found that:

participants fired on an armed target more quickly when the target was African American than when White, and decided not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly when the target was White than when African American;

participants failed to shoot an armed target more often when that target was White than when the target was African American. If the target was unarmed, participants mistakenly shot the target more often when African American than when White;

shooting bias was greater among participants who held a strong cultural stereotype of African Americans as aggressive, violent and dangerous, and among participants who reported more contact with African Americans. shooting bias was greater among participants who held a strong cultural stereotype of African Americans as aggressive, violent and dangerous, and among participants who reported more contact with African Americans1.

The stories above and hundreds of others present a compelling argument that not only does racial profiling exists, but it is widespread, and has had a destructive effect on the lives of communities of color, and attitudes toward police.

Asians, who, according to the U.S. census, number 10 million, or 4 percent of the population, have been victims of racial profiling as well. Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese American was targeted and suspected of espionage on the basis of his race. Memos by high-ranking FBI and Department of Energy officials acknowledged that Lee was singled out because he was Chinese, and eight similarly situated non-Chinese were not prosecuted. 2

In Seattle, Washington in July 2001 a group of 14 Asian American youth were stopped by police for jaywalking, claiming that they were kept against the wall for about an hour. The Seattle Times reported that one officer told them he had visited their country while in the army, and asked them repeatedly whether they spoke English. The paper also reported that U.S. Representative David Wu (D-Oregon) was detained entering the headquarters of the Department of Energy, and repeatedly.

In 2001, the Asian Freedom Project of Wisconsin issued a report that found the racial profiling of Hmong communities there, and included the testimony of adults, as well as boys and girls.

The Garden Grove (CA) Police Department settled a "gang" database racial profiling lawsuit by a group of young Asian Americans who said their civil rights were violated when officers photographed them as suspected gang members based merely on their ethnicity and clothing.

Indigenous people ( Native Americans) call it "DWI," with a new twist: "Driving While Indian." According to the National American Indian Housing Council, there are 2.4 million Indians (including Eskimos and Aleuts) in the U.S. Indians complain about stops and searches by local police and sheriffs on roads leading to and from reservations.

In South Dakota, widespread reports of racial profiling led to hearings before the state legislature, where Indians testified about their being stopped and searched not only based on race but also on religious articles hanging from rearview mirrors, and regional license plates that identified them as living on reservations.

In June 2002 scores of Indians in the state's Bennett County complained to Department of Justice attorneys, alleging racial profiling at the hands of sheriffs there, including vehicular stops in the absence of reasonable suspicion, the administration of breathalyzer tests without reasonable suspicion, warrantless searches of homes and vehicles, and demanding to see drivers licenses and vehicle registrations while inside bars.

Although "Driving While Black/Brown" traffic stops and searches are the form of racial profiling that has received the most media attention, profiling takes place off the roadways as well. Black and Latino pedestrians are regularly stopped and frisked without reasonable cause.

In New York City, the December 1999 report of the New York City Police Departments pedestrian "stop and frisk" practices by the state attorney general provided glaring evidence of racial profiling in the nation's largest city. Blacks comprise 25.6 percent of the City's population, yet 50.6 percent of all persons "stopped" during the period were black. Hispanics comprise 23.7 percent of the City's population yet, 33.0 percent of all "stops" were of Hispanics. By contrast, whites are 43.4 percent of the City's population, but accounted for only 12.9 percent of all stops. Blacks comprise 62.7 percent of all persons "stopped" by the NYPD's Street Crime Unit ("SCU").

In precincts in which blacks and Hispanics each represented less than 10 percent of the total population, individuals identified as belonging to these racial groups nevertheless accounted for more than half of the total "stops" during the covered period. Blacks accounted for 30 percent of all persons "stopped" in these precincts; Hispanics accounted for 23.4 percent of all persons "stopped."

Finally, precincts where minorities constitute the majority of the overall population tended to see more "stop & frisk" activity than precincts where whites constitute a majority of the population: Of the ten precincts showing the highest rate of "stop and frisk" activity (measured by "stops" per 1,000 residents), in only one (the 10 th Precinct) was the majority of the population white. In seven other precincts, blacks and Hispanics constituted the majority of the population. The remaining two precincts were business districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn in which the daytime racial breakdown of persons within the precinct is unknown.

In roughly half of the police precincts in New York City, the majority of the population living in the precinct is white. However, of these 36 majority-white precincts, only 13 were in the top half of precincts showing most "stops" during the period.

In Orange County California, a database containing the names and photographs of reputed gang members appeared to racially profile. 3 Latinos, Asians and African Americans were more than 90 percent of the 20,221 men and women in the Gang Reporting Evaluation and Tracking system, but made up less than half of Orange County's population. The disparity attracted the notice of the California Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as well as the ACLU. We asked the county district attorney's office to establish a civilian oversight board to monitor what we saw as problems with the list.

Youth of color have been victims of racially-motivated bicycling stops, " In April, 2001, the ACLU joined a suit against Eastpointe, Michigan , representing 21 young African-American men who were stopped by the police while riding their bikes there. The ACLU argued that the bicyclists were stopped in this predominantly white suburb of Detroit because of their race and not because they were doing anything wrong. In a 1996 memorandum to the Eastpointe City Manager, the former police chief stated that he instructed his officers to investigate any black youths riding through Eastpointe subdivisions. Police searched many of young men and, in some cases, seized and later sold their bicycles. Police logs and reports in Eastpointe have identified over 100 incidents between 1995 and 1998 in which African-American youth were detained.

A throwback to the grainy '60's black and white television news footage of vicious police dogs attacking peaceful black civil rights protesters is the continued discriminatory use of canine units by police. These dogs, lethal weapons capable of biting at 2000 pounds pressure per square inch, and their handlers have been implicated in a vicious form of racial profiling that has led to legal action:

California (Los Angeles)- The ACLU of Southern California compiled reports on the hundreds of mostly blacks and Latinos who were bitten by Los Angeles Police Department dogs from 1990-1992, charging that the dogs trained to "attack and maul," were routinely sent out in non-violent situations. In 1997, California state highway patrol canine units stopped almost 34,000 vehicles. Only 2 percent were carrying drugs.

Maryland (Prince Georges County) - The Washington Post reported that in May 2001 federal prosecutors charged a county police officer with releasing her police dog on an unarmed Mexican immigrant as part of a pattern of using and threatening the use of the dog on people of color. Despite being the subject of four lawsuits, twice being guilty of making false statements to a supervisor, and five prior instances of releasing the dog on suspects who weren't resisting, and being flagged by a departmental "early warning" system, the officer remained undisciplined in any substantive way. In 1999 the Post reported that thirteen police dog excessive force suits had been filed in Prince Georges circuit and federal courts, in addition to five others that ended in judgement for plaintiffs or settlement. Of the total, ten alleged repeated bites of suspects once under police control, or while cuffed or on the ground.

South Dakota (Wagner)- While not involving the use of physical canine force, the issue reached a new low when school officials and police led a large German shepherd drug dog through classrooms in suspicionless drug searches of Yankton Sioux K-12 students, some as young as six years old. In July 2002, the ACLU filed suit in federal court.

Washington (Seattle) -In 1992 the ACLU alleged that police dog handlers used excessive force on suspects. Dogs were trained to attack and bite suspects regardless of their actions, even against alleged shoplifters, gasoline siphoners and jaywalkers. They also reported that in that year, 40 percent of police dog attacks were against African Americans, and that 91 people had received police dog bite injuries requiring hospitalization.

The following states appear to require independent reasonable suspicion for dog searches: Alaska, 4 Illinois, 5 Minnesota, 6 New Hampshire, New York, 8 Pennsylvania, 9 and Washington. 10

The targeting of shoppers/business patrons of color for suspicion of shoplifting by private security and other employees has disproportionately affected both working and prominent African-American women. TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey said she was refused buzz-in entry to a store even after seeing white women admitted and making a second attempt. After calling from a pay phone and being assured the store was in fact open, a third try failed as well (New York City) . U.S, Congresswoman Maxine Waters said she was followed around a store and required to show her key at a hotel, unlike whites who entered before her ( New York City) . Professional basketball player and Olympic medalist Sheryl Swoopes was kept waiting to be seated for almost an hour at a restaurant, while whites who arrived after her were seated before her (Houston, Texas).

Pauline Hampton and her niece, both African-Americans, were shopping at the Dillard Department Store in Overland Park, Kansas , a suburb of Kansas City, with their children. After making several purchases, they went to the cosmetics counter to redeem a coupon. A white security guard accused Hampton of shoplifting, took her shopping bag, and, without consent, searched it, emptying the bag onto the counter. After finding the receipt for the items, he shoved the goods and the empty bag back to her. When she complained about his actions, the guard ordered them to leave, and threatened to call the police and have them forcibly removed. Hampton eventually called her husband to the scene and the situation escalated. They sued, and were awarded a $1.2 million judgement; the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Dillard's appeal.

The store chain, based in Arkansas has also faced dozens of racial profiling lawsuits, claiming harassment and false arrest, in other states including Arkansas, Iowa, and Texas. Evidence produced in one case showed that although 16 percent of its shoppers were African American, 87 percent of the false arrest claims were made by them. In Texas, Dillard settled and paid money to the family of an African American customer who died at a store after being beaten and hog-tied while being detained, and has also settled discrimination suits by employees in Kansas and Missouri.

Other companies sued for racial profiling include Eddie Bauer, Avis Rent A Car, Denny's Restaurant, The Children's Place, and Holiday Spa.

Worksite Racial Profiling

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has had a history of disproportionately targeting ethnic groups of color for undocumented labor violations. Like all law enforcement, INS agents must have sufficient evidence of wrong doing to establish probable cause or reasonable suspicion to arrest or detain. They may not carry out their duties in a racially or ethnically discriminatory manner. While ethnicity or nationality are obviously critical elements in immigration violations by themselves, without additional facts there is insufficient basis for law enforcement action.

The New York Times reviewed files of INS raids released as part of the settlement of a garment workers union selective enforcement suit against the agency in New York City. The settlement included a summary that Latinos were 96 percent of the 2,907 people arrested in the 187 worksite raids carried out by the INS in the district, fat greater than their representation in the city's legal or illegal population. This occurred even where the INS acknowledged that half the workers were not Latino but Asian, including undocumented immigrants.

And while some raids were based on informant information, 80 percent were initiated by agents who cited as primary evidence subjects' appearance or language without evidence of wrongdoing. Included were skin color, speaking Spanish or English with a Spanish accent, appearing to be of South or Central American descent and wearing clothing "not typical of North Americans." Such characterizations in major American cities are common to born and naturalized citizens alike.

Undocumented workers were discovered and arrested in all but a few of the reviewed raids, but nearly everyone arrested was Latino.

Suits have also been filed in Arkansas, California, Louisiana, and Ohio claiming racial profiling by the INS. A federal court in Ohio found violations of the rights of Latinos by that states highway patrol's practice of stopping Latino drivers to question them about their immigration status, including officers even confiscated the green cards of legal migrant workers claiming they were counterfeit. In California, federal courts have found Fourth Amendment violations of Latinos in the stopping of Latinos on the basis of appearance and foreign sounding names.

The Supreme Court has held that INS agents working near the Mexican border may use Spanish ethnicity as a basis for detaining a person, but that it may not be the only basis.

A related issue is the targeting by police, first reported by the ACLU in Florida, of Latinos waiting on public sidewalks for labor employers to appear and select them for work, under the offense of being "visual clutter."

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"Racial Profiling" refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Criminal profiling, generally, as practiced by police, is the reliance on a group of characteristics they believe to be associated with crime.