As many of you have probably read in the newspapers this week, the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s mistaken arrest has stirred debates about racial profiling in numerous media outlets as well as among academics. The New York Times summarizes: “Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., last week by an officer investigating a report of a burglary in progress. Although charges for disorderly conduct were dropped, the incident has caused a stir over the issue of racial profiling.” (See the full story here.)
Although the some of the details of the case are still contested by the Cambridge police and Professor Gates, the events have generated some thoughtful sociological commentary on the course of events.
NYTimes blog ‘Room for Debate‘ hosted a discussion that featured commentary from scholars of law, psychology, criminology, criminal justice, and sociologist Peter Moskos, who noted:
As long as race matters in America, racial profiling will exist. But counter intuitively, police need to have more discretion, not less, to lessen profiling.
Police, at least in theory, are trained to avoid profiling. The same can’t be said for the public. If a citizen calls to report a suspicious person, police are suddenly forced into a situation that could very well stem from the ignorance or racism of some anonymous caller. And ignorance, which comes from all races, does not lend itself to effective community policing. Unfortunately, the age of the knowledgeable local foot officer is over.
There is a small segment of the population — street-corner young male high-school drop-out drug dealers come to mind — that should be profiled. Police attention will and should focus on high-crime corners. If these corners are black, well, reality often isn’t politically correct. In New York City, there are about 40 white and 330 black homicide victims per year.
Comments 1
Thomas Hanford — July 28, 2009
This addresses the point quoted above -- "If a citizen calls to report a suspicious person, police are suddenly forced into a situation that could very well stem from the ignorance or racism of some anonymous caller. And ignorance, which comes from all races, does not lend itself to effective community policing. Unfortunately, the age of the knowledgeable local foot officer is over." I'm speaking generally, of course, as this case is still evolving, and the facts are not all in.
Certainly we have a crisis in policing - the lack of knowledgeable patrol officers that are engaged with the community. A broader issue here is police-community relations, race aside. Police officers have been removed from being visible, engaged and integral parts of our community fabric, in order to serve the omnipresent police officer model. Police are, as this articles states, relying more on report information and initial complaints than they are their own judgment and knowledge of the people and communities they serve. The broader point here -- where officers are disconnected from our communities and placed in reactive situations more often than not -- is harmful to policing, and harmful to communities.
Profiling, whether it be racial profiling, ethnic profiling or any other variation of profiling itself suggests the need to rely on aggregate information, generalizations and more non-discretionary, 'official' forms of information and knowledge. The point - that officers need more individual discretion, vis-a-vis engagement with their community - is well taken. The heavy reliance on "profiling" in this context and others, in and of itself shows the disconnect that has evolved over time.
The current reactive omnipresent officer policing model, where officers are cloistered behind police car windows, and rely on the "reactive radio" versus knowledge of their "beat" (an outmoded term now) is a well-established argument for sociologists and activists that espouse community police and proactive policing models.