April 25, 1999
Both a Victim of Racial Profiling -- And a Practitioner
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
ASHINGTON -- The spring day was bright and sunny enough for
sunglasses, yet cool enough to require a sweatshirt and baggy sweat
pants. As I walked along a busy street in the predominantly white
northwest Washington neighborhood where I lived, I hardly thought
that my clothing or, more important, my dark skin would attract the
attention of the police.
But sure enough, after a few blocks, a brown and white cruiser
from the Capital Police suddenly pulled alongside. A white officer
jumped out and demanded to know what I was doing there. I live
here, I stammered, somewhat stunned. Incredulous, he asked to see
some identification. I produced a driver's license verifying that I
lived a few blocks away -- that this was, indeed, my neighborhood.
He seemed satisfied. I was not.
"Why are you stopping me?" I asked.
"There was a burglary in the area and you fit the description
of the suspect," he answered, sounding surprised at what he
clearly regarded as a cheeky question.
"Oh, yeah?" I replied. "Where?"
He quickly gave me the name of a street where the crime
allegedly had occurred and departed, leaving me standing on the
sidewalk, seething. I later called the local police precinct to
check out this supposed burglary, and was not surprised to find out
that there was no report of any break-in on that street. The
officer's explanation, I assumed, had been concocted to cover up
what really had happened -- a random stop of a black man who to the
officer's eye did not fit the area.
In the wake of the fatal shooting last month of an unarmed West
African immigrant by members of the Street Crimes Unit of the New
York City police, the issue of whether the police target minorities
for questioning and searches has been thrust onto center stage.
Figures compiled by the New York police show that in the 20
precincts where the Street Crimes Unit has been most active, 63
percent of the people stopped and frisked were minorities. Last
week investigators in New Jersey announced that a two-year study of
random stops on the New Jersey Turnpike showed that roughly
three-fourths of the people whose cars were halted and searched by
state troopers were black or Hispanic.
The numbers are stark, and to civil rights leaders and liberal
politicians proof of the use of racial profiling by police. But the
figures give little sense of the depth of anger of people like me
singled out evidently because of race or ethnicity. The incident
left me frustrated and irate. (At the time I was in my mid-40s but
often could pass for someone much younger.) I thought: I'm a
middle-class black man who works hard, pays his taxes, keeps out of
trouble and tries to treat people with dignity and respect. Why
should I be an object of suspicion?
I railed at the injustice of it all. Yet, as my anger cooled, I
asked myself a harder question: Hadn't I done the same thing
myself?
I thought back to the time back in the early 1970s when, as a
college student in New York City, I supported myself by driving a
taxi at night. In many ways it was a great job for a student --
flexible hours, good pay, a way to meet interesting people,
especially women. It could also be dangerous. In three years, I was
held up twice; once at gunpoint, once when I let a passenger sit
next to me in the front seat and he put a knife to my throat. Both
times the perpetrators were young black men.
Fear chastens you. I did not quit driving a taxi. I liked the
job too much. But I became more choosy about who I let in my cab. I
still picked up black women, older men, couples, families and men
dressed in suits. But my sense of tolerance and racial solidarity
was tested every time a casually dressed young black man,
especially one in sneakers, tried to hail my cab. Most times, I
drove right by. I sometimes wondered about their reaction, but I
kept thinking that if I guessed wrong, I could pay for my mistake
with my life.
Like it or not, I was engaging in my own form of racial
profiling. But I rationalized. Racism, I told myself, would be to
decline to pick up every black person who hailed my cab. What I was
doing was playing the odds, playing it safe, taking no chances.
Looking back, I realized that those I declined to pick up looked
remarkably like I did when the cop stopped me as I walked down a
Washington street.
As I contemplated this, my anger spread to many targets: the
police officer who had confronted me, and the young black hoodlums
whose criminal behavior had made the officer suspicious of all
African-American men in the first place. And I resented the
country's history of racism, which helped to ensure that the
presence of a black person in a leafy, affluent neighborhood of
Washington was still a rare sight.
The nexus of race, crime and stereotyping raises difficult
questions that are often ignored. Even as crime rates tumble, young
black men still commit a disproportionate share of serious
offenses, a fact that is driven home in metropolitan areas by
television's seemingly incessant airing of crime news. And whether
the fear stems from real experience or media-driven perceptions,
people -- police and civilian, white and black -- play the odds all
the time when it comes to how they view and respond to young black
men.
Too often the country fails to acknowledge how widespread the
practice is. Two years ago, at a town hall meeting on race in
Akron, Ohio, President Clinton asked a group of whites who had
joined him onstage whether they felt fear when they saw a young
black man on the street who was not well dressed. A number
sheepishly raised their hands. Clinton thanked them for their
honesty. I sat there wondering, "Mr. President, why don't you ask
the black participants the same question?"
Even the seemingly clear-cut statistics on racial profiling
don't tell the whole story. New York's Street Crimes Unit did
indeed stop and frisk a disproportionately large number of black
men. Yet in those same precincts, 71 percent of the suspects, as
described by their victims, were black men.
On the flip side, New Jersey state troopers arrested or seized
contraband from 13.5 percent of the minorities whose cars were
searched on the turnpike, compared with 10.5 percent of the whites.
At first blush that seems like a sizable difference. But then
consider that the troopers stopped three times as many non-whites
or Hispanics as others: Racial profiling hardly seems to be
producing enough arrests to justify the effort -- or the heartache.
That may be the biggest argument against targeting some people
as suspects based on their race, beyond the constitutional argument
of equal treatment before the law. With crime rates tumbling in
virtually every big city in the land, racial profiling may have
outlived its usefulness. Perhaps if I were a young New York City
cab driver today I would not be as wary of young black men as I
once was. With the streets safer, it could be time for the public
and the police to shed the kind of attitude I held nearly three
decades ago -- the attitude that followed me into middle-aged
respectability on a Washington street.
