Soapbox Law

Reading Adam's blog lately has become a literal exercise in racial exploration. A few years ago the local liberals got the idea that police officers engaged in racial profiling and something should be done to stop it.

I wouldn't even try to begin to deny that officers engage in profiling of many kinds including racial profiling. Sometimes it is proper to do so but certainly there are times when is not (check Adam's latest blog about being the Switzerland of racial bias).

Racial profiling is wrong (and of course unconstitutional when it violates the equal protection aspects of the constitution) when police officers engage in profiling for no genuine law enforcement purpose, such as stopping a black person for being in the "wrong" neighborhood. An interesting aside is that when I first joined LAPD in 1974 and was assigned to 77th Street Area, a predominantly black area at the time, there were several times when white motorists were stopped for being in the "wrong" neighborhood. Sometimes it was to see if they were lost and knew they might be in danger. Other times, there was a suspicion based on race, age, number of people in the car, etc. that the person or persons might be looking to purchase something illegal to smoke or inject or ingest.

Be that as it may, I'm sure that black people have been stopped for no proper reason but I truly haven't seen that in LA though it is certainly alleged often enough.

Back to the point of the story. When I as a Traffic Enforcement (motorcycle) Sergeant picked up on this racial profiling hot topic, I conducted a little audit. I had my squad of motor cops work Western Avenue from the Santa Monica Freeway up to Hollywood Blvd. After three days, I tallied the tickets written by race and found the following approximate results:

35% were written to Caucasians
35% were Hispanic
15% were black
15% were "other" (usually Asian)

These tickets were written primarily between 7:30 AM and 12:30 PM on weekdays.

My thoughts were that this was roughly the racial makeup of the people in that area in general.

I also recall being called to Westwood to talk to a female black driver who had been cited by a male black motorcycle officer. She believed she had been racially profiled even though the officer was black and she admitted that she had committed the violation. She believed that the officer was writing tickets to blacks that he would not have written to whites.

After talking to her for a few minutes I found that her belief was based on the well-known "fact" as reported by the media that officers engage in racial profiling. Without any advance research, I took a chance and asked the officer for his traffic ticket book and the violator and I went through the previous tickets written by the officer. When we found that very few had been written to blacks, she finally accepted that we were trying to be fair and she dropped her complaint.

I also had a black partner once who was stopped (while off-duty) and really treated badly by a Deputy Orange County Sheriff. I believed my partner's account of what happened (he's that kind of guy who just tells the truth) and so I know it happens.

I have no idea what it is like to be black. I have no desire to know. I have my own problems and challenges. But I really try to look at the man or the woman as a human being first and not as a member of some racial group. I may not always succeed but I know this: No black man has ever had any reason to be afraid of me as a police officer solely because he's black.