The Uphill Battle Against Racial Profiling

It's hard to stamp out racial profiling in law enforcement when you've got lawmakers like U.S. Sen. James Inhofe and New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind running around saying it's a good idea. Inhofe, for one, says he "believe[s] in racial and ethnic profiling." Hikind is more demure, saying he's against the concept, but that it's wholly justified as part of the war on terror.

Some recent numbers should make both lawmakers happy. 'Frisked while brown' is alive and well, at least in New York. The NYPD's 2009 stop-and-frisk statistics should come out soon, but meanwhile, Bob Herbert cited numbers

from the first nine months of the year, and they're appalling. More than 80% of the 450,000 people frisked by the NYPD in the first three quarters of 2009 were black or Latino. Only about six percent of these stops end in arrest.

As I've written before, white people are often more like to be caught with contraband, and the latest numbers show that's also true in New York. Weapons were found on 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics and 1.7 percent of the whites. (Of course, there's a better chance of stopping innocent minorities when you stop mostly minorities, so that might skew the data.)

The Center for Constitutional Rights is suing the NYPD over its stop-and-frisk policies, and the department has been turning over vast troves of data that should reveal a lot about department policy and practice on these issues. Similarly, a Maryland court ordered the Baltimore Police to turn over 10,000 documents to the NAACP, which is seeking to documents in order to check whether police are living up their promise to investigate allegations of profiling.

There's a little progress here. Right? Well, at least police who send racial slurs in emails are being held accountable. A Boston Police officer who sent an ugly email after the Skip Gates incident last summer was fired yesterday.

But let's not get carried away. Columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr., allowed himself to hope for a moment that President Obama would condemn racial profiling in his State of the Union address. That may be a stretch.

Obama did say after the Gates incident that "racial profiling still haunts us" -- but then he took it back.

In the meantime, as we face support for racial profiling from folks like Inhofe and Hikind (ostensibly to thwart terrorism), the best tack for reform in law enforcement is being taken by the CCR and NAACP. They're holding individual departments accountable for their promises not to allow racial profiling. The data speaks volumes, and chasing the data is the right move -- even if it takes a lawsuit.

Photo Credit: Diego Cupolo