The Post and Courier in South Carolina recently ran an article on accusations of racial profiling in North Charleston. In that city, police pull black drivers over more often, and black men are twice as likely to be pulled over than white men, the article says, citing police statistics. While African Americans made up 45 percent of the population, they accounted for 65 percent of the traffic stops in which no one is arrested or given a ticket. That led to accusations of racial profiling, and the police chief, Jon Zumalt responded with the usual:
Police officials insist it's a reflection of a strategic, zero-tolerance crackdown on crime in several troubled neighborhoods where the population is predominantly black and where blacks commit the majority of crimes.
Zumult said the strategy of pulling people over for minor infractions has helped reduce the crime rate by 30 percent over the past three years, and the city's mayor says he thinks communities should be happy that fewer black males are crime victims. Officials said they saw no evidence of racial profiling.
Flooding police officers into areas labeled as high-crime by police departments is a tactic that's been used by the New York Police Department for at least a decade. Police departments can always cite some level of suspicion or some slight justification for stopping someone. For drivers, it's a broken taillight; for pedestrians, especially in New York, it's standing on the sidewalk and blocking pedestrian traffic -- which vaguely falls under the disorderly conduct statute -- or a furtive movement. In New York, the statistics come up in the rate at which black and Latino males are stopped and frisked by officers, instances in which the young men are stopped, questioned, and frisked at the slightest hint of anything criminal on the hopes the pat-down will yield something for which they can be arrested. It's an issue Bob Herbert writes about often in The New York Times:
Still, day after day, the cops continue harassing and degrading these innocent New Yorkers, often making them line up against walls, or lean spread-eagled on the hoods of cars, or sprawl face down in the street to be searched like criminals in front of curious, sometimes frightened, sometimes giggling, sometimes outraged onlookers.
If the police officers were treating white middle-class or wealthy individuals this way, the movers and shakers in this town would be apoplectic. The mayor would be called to account in an atmosphere of thunderous outrage, and the police commissioner would be gone.
And that's the point. Pulling drivers over or stopping people on the sidewalk for really small offenses often falls under the officers' discretion. They only do it in neighborhoods they label as high crime, usually poor and majority minority, because they only want to do it if they think the stops will yield bigger results. It just assumes that white people driving through a wealthy neighborhood aren't hiding anything. And it also just reinforces that high-crime areas will stay high-crime, since some crimes, like having a small amount of drugs, are measured by arrested rates. This is what these statistics can help shed a light on: not necessarily the racism of individual officers but on the racist ways in which we view crime in the first place.
-- Monica Potts
