PeteFree.comEnding Racial Profiling in Law Enforcement
© 2002 Peter Free
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Go to: Page 1 ─ Page 2 ─ Page 4 ─ Appendix A
Appendix B ─ Appendix C ─ Appendix D ─ Appendix E ─ Footnotes
Revising the Law Enforcement Mission to Proportionately Balance Enforcement and Social Good
The war on crime is not an unalloyed good. Racial profiling harms minority groups and leads to the disparate contact, arrest and incarceration rates already discussed. Therefore, it is time to rethink what police do and why they do it. Mission becomes the logical starting point.
Overt and unarticulated senses of the law enforcement mission determine how and where police focus their attention. When police focus on an individual, a group, or a community—enforcement action and its consequences follow. When the focus is inequitably distributed, portions of our society suffer injustice and oppression. It makes sense to examine agency missions to see if police priorities are socially distorted.
An example is useful. It combines racial profiling with administrative stupidity in overlooking foreseeable hazards to freedom and life. It demonstrates what happens when our aversion to crime eliminates other important considerations.
An Example of the Police Mission Gone Astray [29]
Unconsidered adherence to traditional views of the police mission can result in social costs that outweigh benefits gained. New York City provides a good illustration. Its police department began a stop and frisk program aimed at reducing gun violence in 1994. [30] Stops were discriminatory. Hispanics were stopped 39 percent more often than whites; blacks 23 percent more. [31] Precincts with the highest crime rates had stop rates in excess of that predicted by their crime rate, and precincts with the lowest crime rates had stop rates below that predicted. [32] In areas where the African American community comprised less than 3 percent of the population, blacks comprised 30 percent of the people stopped. [33]
Outcry led the state Attorney General to investigate the stop and frisk program. Of the total number of stop and frisk detentions examined, he found that only 61.1 percent of the required documentation forms articulated reasonable suspicion. [34] Another 15.4 percent did not justify the stop at all, and 23.5 percent did not contain enough information to make a determination one way or another. [35] The constitutional problem was worsened by the consensus that the required form was more often completed when the citizen appeared likely to complain about the officer's conduct. [36]
The police shooting death of Amadou Diallo illustrates the cost of not taking the predictable consequences of aggressive policing into account when planning enforcement strategy. Diallo, a West African, was shot to death while reaching for his wallet during an investigative stop made by four plainclothes officers from New York's Street Crimes Unit in 1999. [37] The officers claimed they thought Mr. Diallo might have been a serial rapist they were looking for. [38] Forty-one rounds were fired.
Supervisory concerns about a tragic incident like this are not confined to the guilt or innocence of the officers who did the shooting. Administrators should consider the police department's responsibility for putting police in the situation where this sort of indefensible killing is likely to happen. Several considerations come to mind: (a) The team was in plainclothes and potentially difficult for citizens to distinguish from thugs in their midst; (b) the unnecessary descent of four officers on one "suspect" may have escalated [Diallo's] emotional state into volatility; (c) police identifications of suspects described in other crimes are notoriously unreliable; (d) the team's knife-edge suspicion and sense of danger tilted them toward the use of deadly force under circumstances where the force was murderous; (e) the officers began shooting without personally verifying the presence of a weapon; and (f) 22 rounds missed their target and potentially endangered innocent bystanders. [39]
A wise administrator should question the value of deliberately forcing officers to make high numbers of contacts with people they presume to be armed, thereby predictably escalating everyone's tendency toward violence, when evidence is slight that such a practice reduces the crime rate.
When police get caught up in a sense of mission, they tend to believe they must eradicate the crime targeted no matter the cost. They do not care about constitutional or administrative constraints.
"When a reporter asked a veteran police supervisor about the [prosecutor/court] dismissal rates of his unit, his response was that a failed prosecution doesn't matter so long as a gun is taken off the streets...One police officer told a reporter that all the complaints about racial profiling were misplaced. 'It's pure mathematics: the more people they toss, the more guns they come up with.' another officer...said: 'There are guys who are willing to toss anyone who's walking with his hands in his pockets...We frisk 20, maybe 30 people a day. Are they all by the book? Of course not; it's safer and easier to just toss people." [40]
Given the distortions the war on crime has had on disparate treatment of multiracial/cultural America, the law enforcement mission needs to be dissected. The excesses uncovered by New York's Attorney General in regard to stop and frisk in the City [41] reveal how traditional crime suppression can have socially damaging consequences. These reveal a fundamental lack of common sense, proportion, and constitutional regard on the part of police administrators. New York administrators were apparently asleep and drifting thoughtlessly on a sea of crime-fighting zeal.
Why a Distorted Police Mission Survives
Distortions in balancing of anti-crime efforts and rights-preservation survive, because target groups are predominantly minority peoples. They are often poor. Disempowered people are an easy target for the politically attractive war on crime. When high-ranking government officials are not held responsible for the abuses of the agencies they control, even those few citizens who successfully extract monetary damages from the system are unable to effect change. Los Angeles city and county, for example, pay millions in judgments each year for law enforcement wrongs, but these costs have had no remedial effect on either the Police or Sheriff's Department. [42]
The Fix Requires Facing Complexity
The key to fixing racial profiling and other law enforcement abuses is recognizing the fact that the law enforcement mission is whatever society says it is. For example, police rarely enforce statutes that the public grossly disfavors. Similarly, cops target problems brought to their attention by particularly voluble citizens or groups. [43]
Inside the uniform, the world is a huge complex of competing demands for one's attention. Given the fact that police officers are realists, what they look at depends upon what they are told to look at and what they have come to believe should be looked at. There is room in the street officer's mindset for departmental direction, provided the departmental administration is willing to accept and confront the complex reality of a cop's daily world. Unfortunately, most departments do not provide the value-laden guidelines and contextual parameters necessary for handling discretionary tasks. [44]
Implications for the Police Mission
Policing is ultimately not about preserving the status quo. It is more fundamentally about protecting the framework of equitable order in which citizens can pursue constitutionally protected rights and all that entails. Crime impacts this framework of freedom; therefore police attack crime. When police efforts to fight crime damage the same framework by oppressing certain groups, administrators must ask themselves whether their purported cure is worse than the illness.
In the context of racial profiling, the aggressive race-oriented crime suppression destroys the fabric of a multiracial/multicultural society to a degree that far exceeds the impact of the escape of a few drug dealers, small time thieves, and armed assailants. The first step in a legitimate cure for the profiling illness is to step back from rabid, misdirected law enforcement, so that we might learn to operate more equitably among different groups.
Part of the dilemma raised by this point of view is how to protect minority communities in socio-economically disadvantaged locations from the criminals in their midst without continuing to send a disproportionate number of their young men to prison. Disparate incarceration rates have less to do with minority criminality than they do with where and how police choose to focus their resources. Where police look is where they find crime.
It is time to reanalyze the focus of police attention and the way in which police deal with problems that are not fundamentally criminal in origin. Poverty and lack of opportunity, resentment of the dominant culture, broken homes and the long list of factors beloved by political liberals do play roles in the manifestation of the crime that attracts police attention. The police mission needs to encompass at least some sense of responsibility in this area as well.
Inculcating Values Related to an Altered Mission: Officer Selection and Training
Police values can be shaped by the attitudes of chief and command staff, provided subordinates actually respect incumbents. Despite the paramilitary nature of local law enforcement, respect is generally earned rather than accorded with rank. This can create large pockets of resistance to changing old styles of policing. State police and highway patrols organized along a military model may have better luck in changing behavior by fiat from the top down, provided the fiat is followed with supervisory bite. However, it is my experience that supervisors get further with persuasion, consensus building, and leading by example. The people who lead in this manner are the ones it is most important to convince of the necessity for equitable behavior on the street.
In the police world, it is not enough to bring "experts" in to train. Officers quickly pick up these people's ignorance about street realities. The line between citizen and police experience is so clear that few citizens can credibly cross it. Law enforcement is a world that revolves around the physical. The bottom line question is always, "After the talking is done, can I (or we) physically make this guy (who is often drunk, on drugs, or just plain nasty) do what we need him to do?" People who don't understand that reality have no credibility as instructors. Officers will listen politely, then go out and do what they've always done. In their view, street reality dictates what they do, rather than the reverse.
The solution is for the experts to persuade experienced, respected supervisors and instructors of the necessity for change. These insiders have credibility. If they demonstrate that a new way of thinking can work to make the job easier, safer, and less contentious, officers will buy it. Similarly, most officers take their oath of service seriously. Most are ultimate patriots. If their understanding of duty is recast in terms of the service they owe all Americans, many of them will live it, particularly if they were selected into the profession on the basis of their personal belief in that view.
Implementing an equitable law enforcement mission will be easier, if officers are selected for their ability to embrace an expanded sense of evenhandedness in being a cop. To this end, pay scales in some of the major progressive jurisdictions are high enough to attract educated, competent people. If these recruits are subjected daily to the idea that United States law enforcement demands the equitable treatment of all peoples, they will do it. We all do what we are used to doing.
A Significant Hurdle in Eliminating Racial Profiling Is Inadequate Supervision
Supervision is the biggest hurdle in eliminating racial profiling and other police abuses. Supervision, in my experience, is probably the single biggest pitfall in any organization. Supervisors generally lack the combination of interpersonal confidence, sensitivity, awareness and confrontiveness necessary to exercising effective leadership. Law enforcement needs to pay more attention to selecting and training effective, involved supervisors. An equitable mission will make no difference in racial profiling unless that mission is enforced.
To be effective, supervisors must know what's going on. They have to interact with their officers. Line promotions are not an excuse to "administrate" one's way off the street. Sergeants must know what their people have done and how they did it each shift. Mistakes need to be cautioned the first time and documented the next. Evaluations need to highlight areas of officer incompetence or prejudice. [45]
Watch and division commanders need to insist, verify, and document that their subordinates are supervising effectively. They must demand documentation from all supervisors. This documentation must go beyond arrest and seizure totals. It must include explicitly justified ratings of officer performance in the areas of community relations and treatment of minority peoples.
The customary enmity between administrators and the line needs to diminish. [46] Administration must become more realistically cognizant of street reality. In many cases, they must become less cowardly about evading responsibility for the messes their lack of leadership creates. Command staff must provide suggested value laden parameters for contextually specific street situations. A general guiding principle for these should require that police focus their attention so that it is consciously equal, scrupulously fair, and deliberately freedom enhancing.
Staff must have the courage to interface between community and officer without abandoning one or both simply because it is expedient. The chief or sheriff must insist on effective supervision and follow through on her insistence.
(This is page 3 of 4)
Go to: Page 1 ─ Page 2 ─ Page 4 ─ Appendix A
Appendix B ─ Appendix C ─ Appendix D ─ Appendix E ─ Footnotes