When Racial Profiling Cuts the Other Way

Step right up, folks, and test your sociological savvy. Ready?

Two guys are driving through a certain part of town one evening and stop at a market to buy a couple of beers. As they leave, the cops pull up, shouting to get out of your vehicle, get up against the wall, put your hands on your heads!

The men comply. Against their protests, they are searched, their car is searched, twice, three times. One officer shouts that the only reason people of their race could be in that part of town is that they’re up to no good. One man is handcuffed, later released. The other gets a traffic citation because his parking pass is hanging below his rearview mirror.

Now, what color are the guys?

Bzzzzzt. Pencils down.

They aren’t black; they are white. One is described by their attorney as “apple-pie white,” the other as a business-suited Latino lawyer. And one year ago, according to lawsuits filed in state and federal court, all that happened to them as they carpooled home from their office and stopped at a market in Pico-Union.

Well, nobody had to smack me over the head with the irony stick.

A big story of late is racial profiling and DWB, “driving while black,” black- and brown-skinned people stopped for what they perceive as no reason but color. From all the accounts, if black and brown men stopped in DWBs--even politicians and performers--sued every time, the courts would have to run 24/7 to keep up.

What allegedly happened to the two men on a July evening in Pico-Union mirrors a classic DWB, right down to allegations of officers writing up a nit-picky equipment violation to justify a stop that turns up nothing else.

So ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to DWW--driving while white.

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There’s still daylight at 7:30 on a July evening, as there was when they left the law office where Russell Graham works as office manager for his friend Steven Fernandez. Before they hit the freeway for their Westside homes, Fernandez stopped his two-door Honda Civic outside a market where he’d shopped before.

This is how the lawsuit tells it; the city attorney hasn’t yet reviewed it for comment:

Each bought a beer to pop open when they got to Graham’s house. Before they could drive off, a police car angled in behind them, and two officers began shouting the standard orders. Demands flew back and forth. The police told Fernandez to roll up his long sleeves so they could look for needle marks. The men demanded a police supervisor, insisted there was no consent to search the little black Honda and cited the law.

And no fewer than three times, says the civil rights lawsuit, the officers shouted that they stopped the men because they were white, and “the only business any white person had to be there was to ‘buy or sell drugs’ and that hard-working family people are stuck living in this slum and you ‘white people’ come here and ruin their lives by ‘buying and selling’ drugs.” Throughout this, says the men’s lawyer, Robert Sainburg, locals stood and cheered the officers. They shouted the loudest when Graham was handcuffed and driven off to the Rampart Division, to be let go about an hour later. That felony drug warrant that Graham was told was out on him “never, ever” existed, says Sainburg. That traffic citation for the parking pass that hung too far below the rearview mirror was dismissed by the city attorney.

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This is a cosmopolitan city, and people should be able to go to Pico-Union without getting hassled for skin color, right? Now think of another skin color and another part of town. Does it still rankle?

“Profiling” is a sharp tool in law enforcement’s toolbox--nuns are less likely to smuggle drugs than 20-something men--but racial profiling is a dicier matter. LAPD Chief Bernard Parks told the New York Times last month that it “isn’t brain surgery. The profile didn’t get invented for nothing. . . . In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.”

While it is true what George Bush’s drug czar once said, “The typical cocaine user is a white male, a high school graduate employed full time,” it is equally true that it is black and brown drug offenders who fill the courts and prisons and jails.

So both sides in this suit may have a point. Drugs are a scourge of poor neighborhoods; that’s why people cheered as police searched Graham and Fernandez. And yet the same people could be the first to outrage if such a summary judgment were passed upon their sons as they drove through a “white” part of town, some calm evening in July.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.