Norman Kelley: THERE'S A LOOPHOLE IN RACIAL PROFILING

• From Newsday (New York) on May 6, 1999. By Norman Kelley.
  
• Norman Kelley is a freelance journalist, a producer of WBAI and the author of "Black Heat," a novel. 
  

THERE IS A POINT where the nation's war on drugs and the recent killing in Littleton intersect. The war on drugs has made the United States a quasi-police state, where specific classes or races are under constant suspicion or surveillance while others who may be dangerous are not.

Recently, New Jersey finally admitted that its state troopers were using the tactic of racial profiling despite Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's adamant denials regarding the existence of the practice. However, a recent report by the state attorney general confirmed its use. But the quasi-police-state techniques were more extensive than previously thought.

The New York Times reported that the Garden State's troopers had also enlisted workers at hotels and motels along the New Jersey Turnpike to tip them off about "suspicious guests who pay for rooms in cash, make frequent phone calls or simply spoke Spanish." We're talking about informers.

An isolated incident? Not really. This is all part of the war on drugs. As a matter of fact, it is the logical consequence of Operation Pipeline, a program that was instituted by the Drug Enforcement Agency. The program entails 301 police commands in 48 states that monitor the nation's highways, byways and municipalities in search of "mules" (drug couriers).

But what has happened, as Gary Webb detailed in his article "DWB" in the April issue of Esquire magazine, is that the program has zeroed in on blacks and Latinos even though guns and drugs turn up in whites' vehicles with the same frequency as the other two groups.

That single-minded focus on a specific class of people was apparent when the New Jersey police asked the hotel workers to report guests who spoke Spanish.

In another case, it was revealed that of the 735 people detained and searched by Maryland's state police, 75 percent were black. In New York City, the police's Street Crime Unit stopped and frisked roughly 40,000 blacks and Latinos during the Rudolph Giuliani administration and arrested a quarter of that number.

However, the other 75 percent were innocent and one can reasonably speculate that the majority of those "tossed" looked "suspicious" in the eyes of the police by merely being black and Latino in their own neighborhoods.

These examples are cited to underscore a sociological fact, namely that specific classes of the citizenry are under constant surveillance and scrutiny while the most unsuspected class in the nation, white males, are given a pass until their most horrific acts have become accomplished assaults upon society.

Let's recall the initial reaction to the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City.

Arab-Americans were immediately suspected. When it was learned that the "All-American" Timothy McVeigh was charged with the crime, the media's scrutiny shifted to the world of the militias. However, the militias, predominantly white and some with associations to white supremacist groups, were never viewed as a threat to the republic as the Black Panthers were.

The shooting in Littleton reveals a salient fact in American life: Middle-class white men rarely come under suspicion until after the most horrific act has been completed. He will not be racially profiled, although there is a far greater tendency for a certain class of white men to become serial killers and mass murderers. Yet the nation has witnessed repeated mass killings by armed white youths over the past 18 months.

Despite some apparent signs that the alleged killers were troubled youths, their cohorts or siblings will not be subjected to tests to determine if they possess a genetic predisposition toward violence or aggression as were some black and Latino boys in New York last year, a continuation of the government's "violence initiative" by other means. It's questionable if "suburban violence" will be studied the same way "urban violence" has been.

American citizens have made a Faustian deal. They gladly gave up their Fourth Amendment rights to be secured from unwarranted searches for a reduction in crime, especially if those deemed the "other" shouldered the brunt of nation's failing war on drugs, be it incarceration, the stripping of their rights or the imposition of the death penalty.

However, this pact has a price. Lulled into a false sense of security by relocating to the suburbs and establishing gated communities, some Americans may be realizing that the most dangerous group in their midst may very well be their very own sons.

Have the chickens come home to roost?