illogic of police injustice, The

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2002 by Troutt, David Dante

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Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work

David A. Harris

(The New Press, $24.95)

Writing a commercial book about racial profiling by police without either yielding to political correctness or pandering to cops is difficult. If, as David A. Harris must, you to attract readers who will take your arguments seriously enough to support changes in law enforcement policy, you walk a thin line. In Profiles in Injustice, Harris, a professor at the University of Toledo College of Law, does this well, blending vignettes about the civil rights costs of racial profiling with well-researched data about systematic practices that cannot be justified.

More than six months ago, many Americans decided it was appropriate to profile persons who appear to be of Middle-Eastern descent, but few Americans would openly support racially profiling other groups. Those who still do assert its no-nonsense logic: It works. They argue that the disproportionate numbers of Blacks and Latinos arrested and convicted for serious crimes provides overwhelming empirical proof that they should - like it or not - attract a disproportionate amount of police attention, even if it means profiling them.

Harris' argument is a blunt response: No, profiling does not work, not on its own terms, not by any available measure. In fact, high arrest and conviction rates for Blacks and Latinos are reflective of officer bias and cops' (both Black and white) self-fulfilling assumptions of criminal character.

The power of this assumption-busting argument is based on the empirically verifiable concept of "hit rates" - the percentages of traffic or pedestrian stops in which the police actually find suspected evidence of a crime. Despite illusory examples of celebrated drug seizures, Harris argues that hit rates for people of color are about the same or less as those for whites. That is, a similar percentage of drivers of all races are correctly identified by police. The problem is that Blacks, Latinos and others are stopped much more frequently.

Harris' argument - and the book would be much stronger if he had applied it to profiling people of Middle Eastern appearance, but unfortunately, Profiles in Injustice was printed before September 11.

Harris is at his best chronicling the variety of hidden "costs" associated with profiling's unfair and ineffective policies. He describes cognitive research demonstrating police officer tendencies to think of people of color as prone to crime.

Additional data show how racial profiling can have segregative effects, discouraging Blacks from living in certain predominantly white areas and, in one shocking example, giving rise to an apartheid-like policy under which Black employees of a company located in a white area were given automobile tags so local police would know they were not "out of place." All of these results of profiling diminish faith in the criminal justice system, coloring citizen participation on juries and cooperation with criminal investigations.

Then why profile? Harris provides at least two sound answers. First, it's easy. Effective policing, such as intelligencegathering or other investigations, is expensive and time-consuming work. Street "sweeps," and stops and frisks are quick and rewarded by departmental policy. Second, racial profiling as a means of exercising law enforcement discretion is blessed by numerous Supreme Court decisions over the last 30 years.

The final third of Profiles in Injustice is devoted to strategies to end racial profiling-mostly from within police departments-and this is where Harris shows his greatest concern for the delicate culture of law enforcement. Nearly all of his sensible, well-researched proposals fall under what he calls "accountability policing."

His strategies rely on a little-noticed omission in police work: the lack of even basic statistics on police practices, especially at the individual officer level. This fatal flaw of police departments has undermined their ability to manage officer conduct and, ultimately, to reveal just how ineffective a policy racial profiling has been since its formal inception in the 1980s.

Still despite the wealth of powerful arguments in Profiles in Injustice, Harris soft-peddles the most obvious. Having demonstrated that racial profiling does not stop crime and probably immunizes whites, Harris shies from a direct challenge to police departments to defend profiling before the tax-paying public. Departments that fail to do so should demonstrably repudiate the practice. Any evidence of profiling after that should be prima facie proof of racial discrimination for sanction by external bodies: civil courts hearing citizen lawsuits. As Harris amply shows, someone inevitably pays the costs. Victims have paid enough.

reviewed by David Dante Troutt

David Dante Troutt is a professor of law at Rutgers Law School-Newark and author of The Monkey Suit: Short Fiction on African Americans and Justice.