"Racial Profiling: It Works!"

Driving while black
Our view: Maryland's second-highest court should set sensible rules for resolving the long-running dispute over racial profiling by state police

October 1, 2009

African-American motorists are three to four times more likely to be stopped by police on Maryland roads than other drivers, yet they are no more likely to be carrying drugs or contraband. That suggests a pattern of illegal racial profiling, and in 1998 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Maryland State Police to stop the practice. The case was settled by a federal consent decree in 2003 after Maryland agreed to change some procedures and investigate drivers' complaints of racial profiling.

But since then, little has changed. Between 2003 and last year, for example, 70 percent of the drivers stopped and searched on Maryland roads were minorities; over the same period, black motorists filed at least 100 complaints of discrimination. Yet incredibly, not one of those complaints was found to be credible by state police internal investigators. For all the NAACP and ACLU know, nothing was ever done to address the issue. As an attorney for the NAACP put it, the state could have thrown the complaints in a wastebasket and no one would be the wiser.

That's because the records of the internal police investigations into complaints against individual officers are considered confidential personnel records that are exempt from public scrutiny. The state argues that they don't fall under the scope of Maryland's public information act and therefore can be withheld from ACLU and NAACP attorneys seeking to determine whether police are living up to the 2003 consent decree. In effect, the state is saying the public should just take its word that all the 100 or so complaints of racial profiling filed by black motorists over the last five years were completely unfounded.

Rest of the editorial: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bal-ed.profiling01oct01,0,3235753.story

A Comment by one of the geniuses:

I am tired of the ignorance that goes on when dealing with these situations; whether the ignorance is genuine or simply contrived to make a point. The bottom line is that racial profiling works. Period. The validity of its practice as discriminatory is debatable, but the concept that we must treat all people equally when all people do NOT act equally (as a race, or a sex, or creed, etc) is not an argument as to whether or not racial profiling works. When a police officer sees a couple of white folks in a predominantly black neighborhood known for drugs, they stop them. Why??? Because there is something suspicious about that. And that suspicion is based on race and race alone. You can't have it both ways people.

fwhjr (10/02/2009, 10:26 AM )