Profiles of Injustice

Racial profiling, in which law enforcement agencies pull over African American and Latino drivers for no good reason, is so commonly known and understood that the unsanctioned practice has its own shorthand: for African Americans, Driving While Black; among Latinos, Driving While Brown. It’s a problem that for a while Gov. Gray Davis wouldn’t even acknowledge. He now does and wants to outlaw it. So far, so good.

But Davis is balking at a key component of any tough racial profiling law: requiring police and sheriff’s departments to gather racial and ethnic data on all traffic stops. On the surface, such a mandate does appear burdensome, especially to smaller departments. Yet a closer look shows that officers in the California Highway Patrol and more than 50 local departments are already keeping track by relaying that information via radio, keeping the numbers on hand-held computers or other methods already used to log in license plate numbers. The practice need not be burdensome at all.

Davis, however, won’t sign a bill that requires data collection. A compromise between the governor and state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City) is expected to produce a bill that would make racial profiling a state civil rights violation. The governor believes that, in itself, is historic, but such practices have long been outlawed and are already barred by the U.S. Constitution.

Murray is African American and doesn’t need a theoretical lesson on Driving While Black. He has been stopped in Beverly Hills and other localities by officers who he believes singled him out because he is black.

Davis vetoed a bill that would have required police departments to compile information on a driver that would include race, ethnicity, age, why the motorist was pulled over, whether a search was conducted and whether the stop ended in a traffic citation, arrest, warning or no action. The threat of another veto led to the new proposal.

Murray says his new bill would require every officer in the state to be retrained to deter racial profiling. The new training would cost the state as much as $50 million and would be intended to change police behavior. But what would change behavior faster than the requirement to keep a simple record?

The new proposal, likely to become part of SB 66, also would require officers to pass out cards that identify them and provide a telephone number for complaints by motorists who were stopped without being cited or arrested.

There is a history of mistrust between many minorities and law-enforcement agencies, which is why the state should require compilation of the numbers. The governor ordered the California Highway Patrol to collect the data, but he expects local agencies to do so voluntarily.

Many police departments, including San Diego, San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco, are collecting the information. With 50-plus of California’s 433 law enforcement agencies gathering such data, why not Los Angeles?

The Los Angeles Police Department should be in the forefront of collecting data that could build trust among minorities, made leery by the frame-ups of the Rampart scandal and a long history of harassment. Chief Bernard C. Parks contends that the LAPD does not tolerate race-based stops. In that case, it should be extraordinarily simple to tally the numbers.

The governor wants to track school scores to determine which schools do the best job of educating students because specific information leads to specific improvements. Schools that do their jobs well have nothing to hide. The same should go for law enforcement.