No Place for Racial Profiling

An encounter between a black newspaper reporter and a white sheriff’s deputy has brought public attention to an issue many minority residents of Ventura County have complained about privately for years.

Do police officers and prosecutors in this devoutly law-and-order county give more scrutiny and less respect to some kinds of people than to others?

We’re glad Sheriff Bob Brooks has committed to fully investigate this incident. We appreciate his reaffirmation that his department “does not condone or ignore unlawful, biased or prejudicial conduct on the part of its employees.”

Yet we have to wonder if African American and Latino residents of the county share his confidence that Ventura County is immune to nationwide patterns of prejudicial policing that have been documented again and again.

Clearly Mark Jennings doesn’t.

Jennings, 24, an African American reporter for another local newspaper, filed a complaint accusing the Sheriff’s Department of racial profiling after a deputy stopped him for questioning on a Moorpark street. New on the beat, Jennings was interviewing merchants along High Street and had paused outside to make a cell phone call. Only after he showed several forms of identification did the deputy relent.

“Racial profiling” is a term used to describe the alleged police practice of stopping African American, Latino or other minority drivers without reasonable suspicion, to harass and intimidate them and to perhaps discover some evidence of criminal activities. The issue became national news after it was discovered that 75% of the motorists stopped by New Jersey state troopers in one part of that state were African American or Latino. Politicians quickly jumped on the issue and law enforcement officials nationwide were forced to respond.

Because racial information has not been uniformly collected, it has been difficult to document how much of the problem is perception and how much is reality. That is beginning to change. Some 400 of the nation’s 19,000 law enforcement agencies are studying racial profiling, from tiny police departments to huge federal bureaucracies, some aided by sophisticated computer databases. The city of Los Angeles has negotiated with the U.S. Department of Justice to report demographics of those detained by officers, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department also is collecting such data.

Under a state law that took effect Jan. 1, it is against the law for police to engage in racial profiling of motorists. Every officer in California must receive training in recognizing and preventing such practices.

In a published response to news coverage of the Moorpark incident, Sheriff Brooks wrote, “The reality is that we have received only seven citizen complaints of racial bias since 1995, despite having made more than 1 million documented citizen contacts. Not one of these complaints was sustained after being carefully investigated.”

As Ventura County’s population continues to grow and become more diverse, public confidence that no one is detained solely because of the color of his or her skin is ever more important.