Fear of driving while black: I’ve been racially profiled

My parents were overprotective, their fear irrational — until I was stopped on I-4.

In the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, Sheriff Bob Vogel was a name to be feared in Volusia County if you were black. Vogel gained notoriety for ordering his deputies to pull over black male drivers, detain them, and search for large sums of cash or expensive personal property to confiscate. Few arrests were made and money — taken without warrant or justification — was not returned.

As a black teenager growing up in Daytona Beach at the time, my dad — a decorated Korean War vet, and survivor of Jim Crow Georgia — made me commit to one important rule of the road not found in my drivers manual: Don’t drive on Interstate 4.

There were a couple of trips to DeLand or Orlando, and one or two to Tampa without incident. But on a Saturday afternoon, as I was driving home from South Florida where I attended the University of Miami, it happened. I wasn’t speeding, and all of my vehicle’s equipment was functioning normally. I was stopped and drug dogs were called to the scene. But I sat on the side of the road for two hours — with three police cars parked behind me — before I was allowed to leave. This wasn’t the first time (Virginia, following a visit to the U.S. Naval Academy; Orlando, on my way to an interview for West Point; Daytona, a week after my parents bought me a new car for high-school graduation), nor would it be the last (on campus at UM; Orlando after dinner with my wife). “Driving while black” — once an irrational fear of my overprotective parents — became a very real, unforgettable experience.

Few if any of the provisions of the Bill of Rights — the hallowed first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution — grew so directly from the American Colonists’ experience as oppressed subjects of a British monarch as the Fourth Amendment. For years before the Declaration of Independence, British authorities — using writs of assignment and attachment — commonly entered private homes by force, and rummaged through private property without permission in an effort to enforce the revenue laws. The Fourth Amendment represented the new American government’s rebuke of their prior masters’ “illegal searches and seizures,” and formed the beginnings of America’s recognition of citizens’ broader right to privacy. And nowhere in American life has this fundamental freedom to be let alone been so fiercely debated than in the realm of police interactions with the public.

In 2013, a U.S. District Court ruled that New York City’s “stopand-frisk” practice (law enforcement stopping a pedestrian and demanding his or her ID without probable cause) was unconstitutional as applied because 83 percent of the 4.5 million stops made by New York police between 2004 and 2012, were directed against black and Hispanic men — a group that constituted only 52 percent of the population. The reason for the statistical disparity? According to the evidence at trial, the police department had an unwritten rule that encouraged the targeting of the “right people” for stops — what the court called “a form of racial profiling.”

But surely, police would not indulge in such perversions of justice if not for some overwhelming, objective evidence that such tactics yield measurable results in the promotion of public safety. Wrong. There is no demonstrable proof that racial profiling yields anything more than public distrust in law enforcement and substantial monetary damages paid by local and state governments for violating the civil rights of many of the “right people” they illegally stop. More important, as declared in the dissent in the 2006 case of U.S. v. Curtis Ellison (the case that sanctioned running license plates without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing) “just knowing that police can run your plate at any time for any reason is a psychological invasion.”

It is this intrusion — an accumulation of years of microaggressions inducing concern, fear and panic, and necessitating stark conversations with young people of color about where to walk or drive without fear of harassment — that dangerously imbrues the sanctity of the Constitution’s promise of equal protection to all.