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Racial Profiling
Last February, the Thomas S. Foley Institute sponsored a Conference on Racial Profiling. The event was attended by local, state, and national law enforcement officers and experts on the topic.
Michael R. Smith is an associate professor and coordinator of
the Criminal Justice Program in the Department of Political Science
at Washington State University Spokane. He holds a juris
doctorate from the University of South Carolina School of Law
and a doctorate in justice studies from Arizona State University.
Smith is a former police officer and has conducted many
police-related research and evaluation projects. He has worked
on racial-profiling issues with the Richmond, Virginia, Police
Department, the Spokane Police Department, and the Washington
State Patrol, among others. Smith is one of the nation’s
leading scholars in the racial-profiling arena and has published
articles on profiling in Justice Quarterly, Police Quarterly, and the
Journal of Criminal Justice.
| ask. |
Is racial profiling a problem in the United States? |
| MRS |
I think it’s a problem in some communities and in some police departments and not in others. |
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| ask. |
Why would that be? |
| MRS |
I think it has a lot to do with the agency culture, the police department quality, the quality of their police management, who’s hired and who’s not. There are 17,000 police departments in the United States. They range in size from one officer to more than 30,000 officers, and so the quality of those agencies and how they approach the issue of race vary widely. |
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| ask. |
Do you find that along with the awareness of racial profiling there’s an evolving willingness to look at the issue? |
| MRS |
Yes. I think it goes hand in hand with the publicity that the issue has gotten over the last couple of years. And as a result, police departments, some voluntarily, have embraced the idea of examining their practices. Others have been forced into it by their communities or their local politicians to whom they report. |
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| ask. |
What would you hope to accomplish from conferences like this? |
| MRS |
I think first we’d like to educate people about what the issues are and what the challenges are. What we know and what we don’t know. What we could legitimately potentially find out and the questions we may never be able to adequately answer. So I see it as a serial public education purpose. |
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| ask. |
What would you have readers of ask. know about racial profiling? |
| MRS |
There’s no common agreement or conception of what that term means. It means different things to different people. I think what most people would agree on is that when police are using race by itself with no other consideration…that that would constitute the practice of racial profiling. It’s something that most legitimate police departments would prohibit and would discourage. |
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| ask. |
What do you say to the argument that, to a degree, racial profiling makes sense when you consider the percentage of minorities who are incarcerated? |
| MRS |
Well, that’s an interesting question and a good question, and it’s a politically sensitive question as well. Part of what we do as social scientists is try to get these data and analyze them and present them in a way that policy makers can then use to help them make decisions. The question that police chiefs and mayors and city councils are going to have to deal with eventually is just what you asked. Do the numbers show that there is disparity,…that minority citizens of one kind or another are stopped or searched or arrested more often than the white majority population? And what does that mean? Does that mean there is discrimination or racial profiling going on? One answer to that may be “no.” One possible explanation is that those numbers reflect the level of criminality exhibited by the various population constituencies in that area. |
Ronald L. Davis is the former Region VI vice president of
the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives
(NOBLE) and current chair of the NOBLE Task Force on
Racial Profiling. He is also a member of the Race Relations
Commission on Police Integrity. Davis has advised members
of Congress on bias-based policing and testified as an expert
at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearings on racial
profiling and the Congressional Black Caucus hearings on
police misconduct. He developed the first bias-based policing
training course in the country.
| ask. |
Is racial profiling a problem in the United States? |
| MRS |
In my perspective, racial profiling is definitely a problem. It’s a real problem; it’s not a perceived problem. It’s a systemic issue. That’s not to say that there is widespread racism in the industry, but the idea of profiling or biased policing is a systemic issue in the industry, and we must accept that challenge and develop strategies to address it. |
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| ask. |
And when you say systemic, what exactly do you mean by that? Is it hiring practices? Is it training practices? |
| MRS |
Yes, I think you’ve hit two of the key ones. I look at the car stop or the stop of the person that might result in disparity. And that stop is really the end of an entire process. In other words, the end of why the police department is even here. What is the mission of the department? Who do you hire to accomplish that mission? How do you train them to do it? What kind of direction do they get? What kind of orders are they following when they actually do the car stop? How are they being held accountable for providing respectful policing? What type of leadership is provided? [What is] the tone and culture of the organization? All those things lead to the decision-making process when an officer decides to put on his or her lights, decides to use force, and decides to make an arrest. We can’t just isolate the car stop and look at it individually. We have to look at it as the end of an entire process. |
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| ask. |
To a huge degree, this issue of ask. goes out to a very privileged population. Most of us have not grown up with race as an awareness; we’ve not felt that we’ve been pulled over because of what we looked like. So how do you help people understand what it’s like to be victimized or to be in a community where you are likely to be victimized by such a thing? |
| MRS |
I think forums like this. For example, forums and workshop discussions enable a broader community or privileged community to hear firsthand from practitioners [and] possibly from victims. People that may even have practiced it. Whether subconscious or not, [we must] be able to really try to listen with an open mind and ask simple questions—“How would you feel if you were?”—and really listen to what people are saying and try to understand where they are coming from. I think it’s hard to understand in some cases because if you haven’t lived through it, then you’re in a position where you don ’t truly understand it and might not even accept that it’s real. But I say you should listen to what the anecdotes are, what the stories are, to really pay attention to some of the things in the press and make an independent evaluation. |
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| ask. |
What do you say to the argument that, to a degree, racial profiling actually makes sense because there is a disproportionate number of minorities who are eventually incarcerated for crime? |
| MRS |
I would say the incarceration rate reflects more of who law officials focus on than who commits crime. And so this is like a cycle. If we are profiling, that means we are targeting minorities more often, which means we’ll stop more minorities, arrest more minorities, and convict those minorities, and then use that same rate to then justify why we stopped them to begin with. And so common sense would dictate that that’s not the right evaluation tool. For example, 75 percent of narcotics users in America are considered to be nonminorities. However, the majority of people in prison are African American, and the majority of those are there for narcotics use. So that’s where the data comes into play. You have to show people that the mix is not necessarily there. That whether their community has high black-on-black crime or black-on-black violence, that you’re still only dealing with a very small percentage of the black population or the minorities as a whole. And that you can’t make those general stereotypes. There are two arguments that I make. One is constitutional, based on law; the other is just managerial effectiveness. They are making thousands of stops based on stereotypes. They’re not catching who they’re looking for. They’re not having any impact on crime. It’s not resulting in anything other than a very upset constituency and disparities on how we enforce. The data have started showing us that it’s a very ineffective strategy. |
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| ask. |
Tell me a little bit about your personal life. |
| MRS |
I’ve been a cop for 18 years. I have a family of three kids, a 1-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 13-year-old. And this issue [racial profiling] is personal to me. I think I have one of the most unique perspectives in the country. That is, as an African American man, as a black man, I feel like I have been a victim of racial profiling. But as a cop, I know I have been guilty of it. And now, as a police manager, I accept it as my responsibility to prevent it from occurring so that my kids are not profiled when they drive, when they work, when they walk, when they basically live in our society. So when people tell me it’s a perception, I know better because I ’ve been on both sides of it. |
Washington State University was involved in another high-profile project related to racial profiling in 2003. Over 20 months, researchers from the Division of Governmental Studies and Services (DGSS) at WSU analyzed data from more than two million traffic stops to determine if racial profiling or biased policing is being practiced by the Washington State Patrol.
“What we found in our exhaustive study,” said DGSS director Nicholas Lovrich, “was that there does not appear to be biased policing within the patrol.” The research team, which included professors Clayton Mosher and Mitch Pickerill, concluded that there are no significant disparities in stop rates observed across ethnic/racial driver classifications. According to the 125-page report, “These findings are unequivocal and clearly demonstrated—the likelihood of being stopped by the WSP is not affected by the race or ethnicity of drivers on Washington’s roads and highways.”
Because the WSP only issues tickets in about 30 percent of its traffic stops, the WSU team also looked to see whether any one ethnic group was receiving a higher rate of tickets over another. Tested under academic analysis, the data clearly demonstrated that the decision of whether to cite was likely to be based upon contextual factors, such as the violation’s seriousness and the number of offenses observed by the trooper, not the person’s race or ethnicity. |
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