Arizona takes racial profiling to new low

Pressure groups, including Reverend Al Sharpton, have shown no fear of marching the streets in Arizona to protest the state’s new immigration law. The law requires police to ask for the identification of persons, who they suspect are in the country illegally. Set to take effect in late July or early August, activists claim that outrage over the law has “awakened a sleeping giant,” as rallies demanding federal immigration reform continue to sprout in cities across the country.
Even President Barack  Obama has weighed in on the matter, calling the law “misguided,” and has instructed the United States Justice Department to examine it for legality, according to published reports.
But really Black people, what is there to examine other than history in this particular case? We know more than anyone else that the roots of racial-profiling run deepest in our community, spreading from the distant past to the present day.
“Racial profiling has become almost as American as apple pie,” said David Horne, executive director of the California African-American Political Economic Institute (CAAPEI) located at California State University, Dominguez Hills. “It doesn’t matter whether they are Black, White or Latino, officers look for criminality in Black and Brown people,” he added.
Of course, this unabated practice is in direct opposition to the 14th amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause.
But all of us know that laws are meant to be broken, especially when they’re broken by those who are supposed to enforce them.
So, to put your curiosity to rest President Obama, assuming this hasn’t been done already, the answer is yes; racial profiling is still very “legal” (despite the aforementioned) and has been ever since our forefathers arrived in Jamestown, Va. in 1619.
One man who knows this more than anyone is Henry Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who Obama went to bat for (and struck out) during a live prime time news conference which largely dealt with healthcare. Gates, a Black man, was arrested just hours after he and a colleague forced open the jammed front door of his Cambridge, Mass. home in 2009.
Ironically, friends of the “mild-tempered” scholar informed the “Boston Globe” that he was asked to show identification, when Cambridge police arrived at his doorstep in response to a 911 caller’s report of men breaking and entering the residence. Gates would soon be handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours, and booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” while the investigation was in progress, according to a police report.
But, in essence, his reaction here is far more warranted than the reaction of those in Arizona who had the chutzpah to slather refried beans in the shape of swastikas on the state Capitol’s windows only days after the new immigration law was passed. No disrespect to the Latino community, but try walking a mile in the shoes of a Black man before you even start complaining about pro-discrimination laws.
Besides, as reported by the Department of Homeland Security in 2009, law enforcement officers have an estimated 6.65 million illegal reasons to suspect that a Hispanic might have tip-toed across the border at one point or another. But what is their excuse for racially profiling African American U.S. citizens?
Oh … that’s right critics, it’s because of the drugs we sell; the weapons we carry; and our sheer distaste for the law, correct? Well, think again says Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale Law School and author of “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart.”
After analyzing the latest report given by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California, Ayers found that out of 700,000 cases in which Los Angeles Police Department officers stopped pedestrians and/or drivers of motor vehicles between July 2003 and June 2004, stopped Blacks were 127 percent more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, but were 42.3 percent less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25 percent less likely to be found with drugs and 33 percent less likely to be found with other contraband.
Ayers also discovered that for every 10,000 residents, about 3,400 more Black people were stopped than Whites, compared to only 360 more Latinos. In addition, stopped Blacks were 76 percent more likely to be searched, and stopped Latinos were 16 percent more likely to be searched than stopped whites.
Not surprisingly, then-Police Chief William J. Bratton quickly rejected these findings, primarily because the study used data that was more than four years old, at the time it was released in 2008. This is a fair point.
But Ayers had no other choice: The department has not released the more recent stop data it’s been collecting, nor has the data been analyzed to test for racial disparities. Whatever the numbers might be, Professor Horne expects they won’t be in our favor.
“Is there a Black man in this country who drives a car or goes out in the public, who hasn’t been racially profiled?” he asked with a chuckle. “It’s almost a right of passage.”