Racial Profiling Is Easy to Spot From Behind the Wheel

Recently Gov. Gray Davis vetoed a bill that would have required law enforcement agencies to keep statistics on the race of motorists who are pulled over.

He said, among other things, that there is no evidence “racial profiling” is a statewide problem among law enforcement officials.

Fair enough.

But countless honest black and brown Americans don’t need statistics to know something is wrong. They have something better: personal experience that the law is applied differently to “us” and “them.”

Personal experience that slowly turns everything a person believes in upside down, from politics to trust in the law to the very idea of what it means to be an American.

Could the following ever happen to Davis?

*

Say a young brown man--let’s say it’s me--is driving on the Golden State Freeway from Los Angeles to Kern County. I’m wearing a commonplace T-shirt and jeans.

In the eyes of law enforcers, I’m a suspicious character because it’s well-known that drug runners along this corridor are often Latino men. Chances are I’ll get pulled over, most likely by a drug-enforcement unit.

In this particular case, there are three units, six officers, lingering at the side of the road. As I pass by, they examine everything about me and my 1988 Corsica, making eye contact.

In my rearview mirror, I see them rush into their cars. My heartbeat accelerates because this is exactly how another incident started just months before. Moments later, they’re behind me. I feel like prey.

I exit the freeway. They exit too.

I’m nervous and distracted so I pull away from the stop sign somewhat abruptly.

The red lights come on. I pull into the parking lot of a Burger King.

They surround my car. Five officers rest their hands on their guns. One approaches my window and politely says: “You look a little nervous.”

“Can I ask what this is about?” I ask timidly.

“For one, you pulled away from the stop sign too fast,” the officer says. “You almost caused an accident . . . license and registration, please. Do you have any weapons or narcotics?”

“What?” I say inside my head.

“No,” I hear myself say out loud.

“Is it OK if we search your car?”

I’m not sure what my rights are, so I agree.

“Can you please put your hands behind your head, I’m going to check you real quick. It’s for your and our protection.”

I stand to the side. They open the doors and trunk. They check my traveling bag.

“I’ve never even seen drugs,” I think to myself. I try to hold back tears of anger and humiliation.

Women, children walk in and out of the restaurant. They look at me. I look at them and they quickly turn away. Maybe I just became their image of a criminal.

“He’s clean,” the officer yells.

They drive back to the highway. I quietly put my things back in the trunk.

*

That year I was pulled over three times.

And would Davis ever experience this episode:

One day after a North Hollywood shootout between police and two bank robbers, I’m sitting in a company car in a middle-class Thousand Oaks neighborhood after interviewing a wounded LAPD officer at his home.

I’m relaying information to my editor on the car phone when a woman comes out of her house.

“Excuse me. Can I help you with something?” she asks. “We don’t have too many people around here just sitting in their cars.”

I explain why I’m there. She asks for my company ID, a business card, the business card of the officer I came to interview, my driver’s license and begins to write down the information.

“Does it bother you that someone is sitting in a car or does it bother you that it’s me?” I ask.

She ignores me and keeps writing.

*

What makes me angriest two years later is that I didn’t tell her to get lost or to call the police if she thought my use of the public street might be illegal.

Memories of the incidents are fading. But there have been other changes--in me.

The pro-law-enforcement conservative who once worked for a Republican congressman began to disappear the first time I held my hands behind my head at the side of the road.

Now there’s a political apathy that shows when a police officer has been killed. That conservative shakes his head and says: “That’s too bad.” But there’s also the voice of a hardened man who says: “So what?”

This year, on the Fourth of July, I was self-conscious about being patriotic for the first time in my life.

I saw a community gathering at a Simi Valley park near my home. If I tried to join the celebration, I thought, would I fit in? Could I glide in there just as naturally as a white American, as naturally as the governor?

One thing I have learned in the last few years is that people do not necessarily see themselves the same way they are seen in a society terrified of crime.

Davis may be right that there is no scientific evidence that racial profiling is rampant. But it’s all too obvious that some people are expected to do a lot more explaining than others.

*

Jose Cardenas can be reached by e-mail at Jose.Cardenas@latimes.com.