Racial profiling, or just good policing?

I enlisted in the Air Force at the outbreak of the Korean War. This was just four years after President Truman integrated the armed services by presidential decree. The experience of associating with African Americans as equals for the first time contradicted what I had been taught about white supremacy while growing up in the Deep South. And with my changed outlook I agreed with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board Decision that overturned the South’s Jim Crow laws once and for all. But racial progress has been anything but steady and smooth since then.

To my knowledge no ethnic group has ever come so far, so fast as African Americans, from abject slavery to the presidency of their country in 151 short years. That is unprecedented in human history. But both the American black and white communities still have a long way to go. Ours is not yet a post-racial America.

One of the biggest roadblocks to better race relations today is African Americans’ resentment of police investigations of black suspects at a higher rate than whites, called racial profiling. But unfortunately law enforcement agencies cannot always take sociological or demographic considerations into account when investigating a crime. In order to achieve the surest results they usually concentrate on areas where the most crimes are committed irrespective of their ethnic composition. This is simply smart policing.

Many times a police officer’s decision to stop and search a suspect is based on behavioral and other clues such as unusual nervousness, shifting eyes, resemblance to known suspects, no driver’s license, improper vehicle registration and signs of drug abuse or possession. Intelligent po- lice work also includes concentrating on the areas with the highest crime rates. As long as criminal activity is not equitably distributed, and it rarely is, members of groups who commit the most crimes will continue to receive the most attention. Again, that’s just smart investigative strategy.

A black man in a car with tinted windows driving slowly through a white residential neighborhood at night in Ringgold or LaFayette will no doubt attract attention. And so will a white man driving through a Chattanooga lowincome housing project. Both incidents strongly suggest burglary or drug activity and are worthy of police attention. Without such practices, which some might rightfully call profiling, police effectiveness in crime prevention would be severely limited.

In Los Angeles, for instance, African Americans comprise only 11 percent of the population but commit 41 percent of the crimes. Should the L.A. Police waste valuable time trying to investigate crimes based equitably and fairly on ethnic population distribution figures? For the surest results they should concentrate on areas where the most crimes are committed.

Although it might seem unfair (and whoever said this world was fair anyway?), in the course of good law enforcement investigative stops and searches should continue to fall heaviest on those who commit the most crimes, irrespective of ethnicity. That’s how the best results are obtained. The police department’s first job is crime prevention, not the correction of social injustice.

George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@bellsouth.net.