Profile Onto Others… (As You Would Have Them Profile Onto You)

If someone told you that all cops are racist jerks, what would you say? Or what if he said that all Hispanics are gang members, or all Native Americans are alcoholics? You may remind him that all is almost always a dangerous word to toss around causally. You may try to bring up examples that transform that all into “some” or even, “a few.” Or you may just declare that person unreasonable and walk away.
Simply put – things just aren’t all that simple.

The Issue

On Tuesday night, a sometimes-heated meeting involving the Moorhead Human Rights Commission (MHRC) and Moorhead Chief of Police David Ebinger illustrated just how complicated the issue of race can get when it comes to law enforcement.
Following a 2002 report that indicated potential racial profiling in car searches by the Moorhead Police Department, relations between the MPD and Moorhead’s growing minority population have been tense at times, and on Tuesday night those tensions finally gave way, possibly clearing the path for future progress.
But what does that report really tell us? Is it a smoking gun that definitively links racism to the MPD? Does the statistical correlation (Hispanics and Native Americans experiencing a higher rate of vehicle searches) suggest an undeniable causation (racism)?
To examine those questions we need to take a closer look at the term “racial profiling,” starting by asking another question: Which word of the two makes it wrong, racial or profiling?

The Attitude

If a young white male with a beard and shaggy hair is pulled over in his beat-up old car, is he more likely to be searched than a middle-aged African American lawyer who is wearing a conservative suit and driving a newer-model Toyota Camry? If so, how is the white male being profiled? Perhaps by age, sex, economic status, clothing, appearance, the music on his radio, his bumper stickers and so on.
If he is searched and something illegal is discovered in his car, is this a case of non-racial profiling or successful police work?
The problem, of course, arises not from those who are breaking the law but from those who aren’t breaking it yet still feel instantly perceived as guilty by officers who rely on a priori fallacies in lieu of tangible evidence. Whether an innocent individual feels singled out because of his or her race, vehicle, clothing, or any other benign indicator, the result is almost always the same –  distrust and in some cases contempt directed not only toward the officer who searched him or her, but also for law enforcement in general.
This attitude – while understandable because shrugging off insults isn’t an easy thing to do – is not fair to the majority of police officers who are serving the public well and risking their lives to protect ours. Just as some Hispanics are gang members and some bearded white males are drug dealers, some does not equal all, and a form of reverse profiling is created when some racist, or even perhaps just naïve, officers cause a group of citizens to label all cops as an untrustworthy enemy.
Such blanket thinking quickly snowballs and then splits off into two tragic directions. The first may partially explain the 2002 report’s discrepancy between car searches for whites that have been pulled over vs. searches of minorities.
While there is no official data or policy to back this up, many police officers would agree that the number one cause for a vehicle search is not based on how a person looks but rather on how they act, be it nervous, rude or generally suspicious in any way. Therefore, it stands that a person who has had previous negative experiences with police will be more likely to prejudge the situation before the officer is even at his or her car door. This judgment creates nervousness and sometimes even anger in people who are completely innocent.
But to assume that an officer will be unfair before the encounter has begun is really no different from an officer who assumes that every Hispanic male on a street corner is a criminal. More often than not, this vicious cycle pits a good cop and a good citizen at odds for no reason.
The second direction this takes – that in which some citizens feel that police in general are corrupt and therefore there is no use in reporting one officer’s inappropriate behavior to another cop – is even more dangerous.
At Tuesday’s meeting Chief Ebinger cited this as the greatest impediment to his own desire to weed out any officers who venture far past the line of accepted conduct.
“I want to be an ally in this,” he said. “If my people need to be educated, retrained, disciplined, fired or even prosecuted, I will do that or the city commission should fire me.”

The Action

The citizens of Moorhead can take Chief Ebinger on his word and trust that complaints of officer misconduct will be investigated and dealt with accordingly, but in our system of government, they don’t really have to. As the chief admits in his statement, a procedure is in place for dealing with this issue. The citizens simply have to use it, but how?
Here is my take: The first step is to trust the police enough to bring forth a complaint. If it helps, you are welcome to enlist the aid of the MHRC. Ebinger stated that all complaints – even those that appear far-fetched from the outset – will be investigated.
Next, a person should work with the police, not against them. Keep in mind that the officer investigating your complaint is a completely different human being than the one you filed the complaint against, and that you are likely to receive a better response by being respectful and polite to that officer. (Not only does the “more flies with honey than vinegar” method apply here, but if you are rude to those who are trying to help, you also risk being brushed off as a person who is looking for any reason to question police behavior.)
If you feel unsatisfied with the outcome of the MPD’s own investigation, you can then file a complaint with the City Council, and if you feel as though the City Council is not addressing the problem, you can then volunteer to help others get elected in their place or even run against one of them.
Sound like a lot of work? Unfortunately, many of life’s most important actions are far from easy. You can change the future, but you can’t change the amount of effort it will take to do so.

The Reality

In a perfect world, all police officers would perfectly handle every situation. Oh, wait. In a perfect world, there would be no cops because all crimes would cease to exist. The flawed world we do have consists of both good people – including good Hispanics, good cops, good Jews, good Muslims, good Native Americans, good millionaires, good hobos – and also an indefinite number of people from all these groups who may not be all bad but who do bad things that impinge upon the rights of others.
Mistakes—and sometimes blatant and atrocious misconduct—will occur because we can’t eliminate human error from any system without eliminating humans altogether. However, we must remember that the goal of democracy is not perfection but rather the establishment and protection of the apparatus for addressing gross imperfection. At the local level, active citizens are the checks that bring the balance to the scales of justice.
Simply put – unused freedom is simply handed away, not stolen from your hands.