Racial Profiling a Conundrum for Police

Two years ago, no police force in the nation kept sufficiently detailed records of traffic stops to tell whether officers were targeting minority drivers. Today, almost half of the 50 biggest cities and hundreds of smaller towns keep and analyze such records.

Early results back up what had long been suspected--that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be pulled over than whites. Police defend their practices as professional, calculated crime-stopping. Minority advocates charge bias. Public opinion polls show most Americans believe so-called racial profiling is a widespread wrong.

But even with all the number-crunching, no one--not the courts, not police, not civil rights groups--knows precisely what the statistics show or what to do with them. That’s because there is no agreement about what racial profiling looks like on paper, or how to measure it.

Suppose blacks make up 15% of a city’s population but 20% of the traffic stops. Is that profiling? What about 30%?

And what about searches--potentially humiliating encounters experienced more often by black- and brown-skinned drivers. Is it profiling if police search black drivers’ cars three times more often than those of white drivers?

Advocates on all sides had hoped cold, hard facts would settle anecdotal accusations of profiling once and for all.

The truth, however, like race itself in the United States, is beyond simple black and white.

“That is the new problem of racial profiling,” says Capt. Ronald Davis, an Oakland officer and vice president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.

“I think it’s pretty evident that it does exist,” Davis says. “The next question that has to be answered is, what does the data mean and what do you do with it?”

These questions demand attention because a flood of information is on the way.

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. Most are tracking stops voluntarily, though the New Jersey Highway Patrol and departments in Los Angeles and Highland Park, Ill., collect data under court order.

The Justice Department has pushed police to begin gathering the information, saying the process can overcome mistrust and enlist citizen support in solving crimes.

“We have found that when such records are maintained, it tends to clear the air somewhat,” Bill Lann Lee, outgoing assistant attorney general for civil rights, told lawyers at a meeting of the American Assn. of Law Schools last year. “[Police] then know what, in fact, is happening.”

Even Statisticians Are Puzzled by Data

Because the field is so new, however, officers more often find themselves wrestling with questions that not even professional statisticians have resolved.

“It’s the most perplexing question, how to analyze the data once you’ve collected it,” says Deborah Ramirez, a law professor at Boston’s Northeastern University enlisted by the Justice Department to recommend national data collection standards. “There isn’t a formula here.”

And with no formula or precedent or even guidelines, police and citizens can draw very different conclusions from the same set of information. Consider the case of Michael McBride.

One Tuesday night in March 1999, McBride, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, was driving his 1979 Datsun down a neighborhood street in San Jose when he spotted a patrol car traveling in the opposite direction. As the cruiser rolled past, he noticed the two officers inside looking him over.

Moments later, the officers stopped his car and said he’d been swerving.

They handcuffed McBride, a youth minister with no criminal record, and searched his car for contraband. They found only Bibles.

Then, in what he describes as the most degrading experience of all, one officer turned the search on McBride.

“He reached in between my legs and grabbed my groin,” McBride says. “This is the first time I’ve been roughed up like this.”

McBride says it was the 10th time he’d been stopped by police.

“If I was a white person driving down that street, I don’t believe they would have made a U-turn,” says McBride, now 25.

Eventually police released McBride without charges. But he lodged charges in the court of public opinion.

McBride’s allegations of profiling sounded too familiar to San Jose minority groups, who publicly criticized the police. An internal review found no wrongdoing, but Chief William Lansdowne decided San Jose would become the first city in the nation to find out if its officers were targeting minorities for traffic stops.

His decision earned San Jose praise as a model of progressive policing. But last year, as the department began to release its traffic-stop numbers, civil rights groups were alarmed by the department’s analysis. The fallout shows how fraught with complexity profiling can be.

In the year ending June 2000, San Jose police stopped almost 100,000 drivers. Here’s what the numbers showed:

* Hispanics, who made up 31% of the city’s population as tallied in the 1990 census, accounted for 41% of those pulled over.

* Blacks--4.5% of population, 7% of stops.

* Whites, 43% of population, 32% of stops.

* Asians, 21% of population, 16% of stops.

To McBride and other minority advocates, the statistics don’t lie: Police stop blacks and Hispanics in disproportionate numbers.

Nor do the statistics lie to Lansdowne: His officers stop members of all racial groups without targeting minorities.

“We think the numbers right now are with the norm for us as a city,” Lansdowne says. “There’s a logical explanation. . . . Nobody can tell us we’re right, nor can anybody tell us we’re wrong.”

Lansdowne explains that San Jose police are assigned to their beats by a computer, which is fed city crime statistics. Officers therefore patrol crime-prone neighborhoods, which typically have denser minority populations.

Among the criticisms of the police statistics was their failure to reflect how many searches followed traffic stops. The American Civil Liberties Union chided the department for this blind spot, contending that minorities are routinely harassed after they’re pulled over.

Lansdowne says he wants to track searches in the future. With no model to follow, he says, learning how best to collect and analyze data is an evolving process.

“Both sides have a tendency to look at the issue and be defensive,” Lansdowne says. “I think we need to look beyond that.”

Gathering Information Is Labor-Intensive

The profiling picture has other holes. Police are using 10-year-old population data, woefully outdated for a city as racially and ethnically dynamic as San Jose.

Data from the 2000 census, to be released in March, won’t necessarily help. The census measures who lives in a city, not who drives there. Poorer residents, who tend to be minorities, are less likely to own cars--so the ratio of minority drivers to white drivers is even smaller than census numbers suggest.

To learn who’s on the road, researchers must stand on corners and count faces--something racial profiling researcher John Lamberth has done in areas outside Philadelphia and Detroit.

It takes 800 man-hours to get a good measure of the driving population--labor-intensive work, he concedes, but absolutely necessary.

“One of the problems you run into when you do it the way San Jose did [using residential populations, not driving populations], you end up with the police department saying that we’re not profiling and the community saying there is,” says Lamberth, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “And nothing has really been settled.”

Such has been the early pattern in police departments nationwide.

In September, San Diego police acknowledged they typically pulled over blacks and Hispanics twice as often as whites but said they couldn’t conclude this constituted profiling without a widely accepted way to interpret their data.

In October, data showed Texas state troopers wrote a disproportionate number of tickets to blacks on interstate highways. State officials disputed the conclusions, saying the study was flawed because it compared ticketing to each county’s racial makeup, whereas interstate drivers often come from miles away.

Only the most egregious cases preclude disputes--as in New Jersey, where the state acknowledged in November that at least 80% of discretionary car searches by state troopers were of minority drivers.

The debate is still too new for all sides to agree on standards to analyze the data--indeed, police aren’t even collecting the same information. So the Justice Department hired Northeastern’s Ramirez.

In her report, published in December, Ramirez recommended that police record details of searches as well as traffic stops. But she avoided suggesting a definitive standard for racial profiling.

Lamberth is the only expert interviewed willing to hazard even a tentative formula. He suggests that police have a problem if their stops of minority drivers are 50% above the minority’s share of the driving population--for example, if blacks are 10% of drivers but are involved in 15% of stops.

It’s a starting point based on experience, not science, he concedes.

And certainly not the law. Judges have been able to sidestep the need for standards because the first rounds of cases--including high-profile lawsuits against New Jersey and Maryland state troopers in the late 1990s--were settled out of court.

Statistics Alone Aren’t Enough

“The challenge of the racial profiling cases is that we start with statistics to get inside the heads of police officers,” says Harvard Law School professor Margo Schlanger.

“As a legal matter, that’s a very difficult thing to do--officers can defend the statistics by saying that there are just more African Americans who do suspicious things,” she says.

Stopping drivers as part of a drug sweep in a minority neighborhood plagued by crack dealers could mean a high number of blacks pulled over and searched--and be the kind of effective police work most citizens desire.

Conversely, if police in a largely white suburb stop black drivers because they think they don’t belong there or “look suspicious,” it would seem a clear case of racial profiling.

But the kinds of numbers that departments are collecting don’t make for clear-cut cases.

“You need additional facts in order to know whether that is true or false,” Schlanger says. “The statistics alone can’t make the case of intentional discrimination.”