Racial Profiling Is a Conundrum for Law Enforcement

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 Highland Park, Ill., police collect data under court order. 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.

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.”

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,” said 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.

“The statistics alone can’t make the case of intentional discrimination,” said Harvard Law School Professor Margo Schlanger.