January 5, 2002
America's Most Wanted did a special show a few days ago for the most heroic cop (or something like that). One of the people up for consideration was a cop who was on a stakeout and saw a black guy in a minivan acting suspiciously. He pulled away from his stakeout and requested that a marked unit make a traffic stop so they could look inside the car (you don't need probable cause to look in the windows).
Now wait right there, you're probably saying. All they had to go on was a black male acting suspiciously? That's profiling!
Except that the original cop was also black. And he was right -- a woman had been carjacked and was being held at gunpoint in the back of the van. The cop deciding to blow off the stakeout and follow the van might have saved that woman's life.
He's (quite rightly) regarded as a hero. But it brings up a few questions.
What would the reaction have been if he'd been wrong? It obviously wouldn't have received national attention, but what would have become of the cop? Would he have been disciplined for leaving his post? I'd personally find it difficult to reprimand an officer for following his gut when he thinks something might have been wrong, but I may not think like his supervisor.
What if the officer been white? Would the carjacker have been able to claim that even though he had in fact committed a crime, the only thing the police originally had to go on was DWB (Driving While Black)? Even though he was in fact guilty, would the carjacker have won in the "court of public opinion"? Would he even have been found guilty, or would some judge have decided that the traffic stop was a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
On a related note, what exactly is profiling? There seems to be a fine line at best between racist behavior and trusting one's gut. And I think that we, in general, do both the police and the victims of real profiling injustice when we lump any white-cop-pulls-over-black-motorist incident under the header of "Racial Profiling" -- real life has a lot more gray area than that, as I hope the last two questions have illustrated.
To widen the point, what if the motorist had been another minority? With the newfound interest surrounding air travel security, we now have something similar: FWA (Flying While Arabic). In fact, racially-based occurances regarding Arabs seem to be on the rise in this country. Or maybe they're just being reported now. But it seems that a lot of the people who think that the older DWB type of profiling is horrible are willing to allow this newer FWA type. Isn't it all the same? Or is it different since you think you're more likely to be affected by an airline bombimg than a misguided traffic stop?
Not so clean-cut any more, is it? Good. It shouldn't be. Each situation needs to be addressed individually. People aren't robots -- given the same circumstances, they won't always react the same way. Chaos theory abounds in the gray matter of all 6 billion of us. And the little five-paragraph nugget the news gives us doesn't even siginificantly scratch the surface. Which means we shouldn't be so quick to judge.
