As a part of this same tradition, racial minorities (especially Black people) became the objects of police control,38 the targets of brutality, and the victims of neglect.39 Perhaps the clearest inheritance from this tradition is the racial characterization of criminality—the criminalizing of people of color, and Black people especially. Presently understood in terms of “profiling,” the practice is much older than the current controversy. Under slavery, “Bondsmen could easily be distinguished by their race and thus became easy and immediate targets of racial brutality.”40 The only thing new about racial profiling is the term, which makes prejudicial harassment seem procedural, technical, even scientific.
Profiles and Prejudice
One critic of racial profiling, David Harris, defines the concept in terms of more general police techniques. He writes:
Racial profiling grew out of a law enforcement tactic called criminal profiling.
Criminal profiling has come into increasing use over the last twenty years, not just as a way to solve particular crimes police know about but also as a way to predict who may be involved in as-yet-undiscovered crimes, especially drug offenses. Criminal profiling is designed to help police spot criminals by developing sets of personal and behavioral characteristics associated with particular offenses. By comparing individuals they observe with profiles, officers should have a better basis for deciding which people to treat as suspects. Officers may see no direct evidence of crime, but they can rely on noncriminal but observable characteristics associated with crime to decide whether someone seems suspicious and therefore deserving of greater police scrutiny.
When these characteristics include race or ethnicity as a factor in predicting crimes, criminal profiling can become racial profiling. Racial profiling is a crime-fighting strategy—a government policy that treats African Americans, Latinos, and members of other minority groups as criminal suspects on the assumption that doing so will increase the odds of catching criminals.41
Harris is right that racial profiling is a subset of criminal profiling, but he has the genealogy reversed. As we saw in previous chapters, long before the police used high-discretion tactics and vice laws to regulate the lives of the immigrant working class, their predecessors in law enforcement were using race as the sole factor directing their activities. Harris overlooks a crucial feature of this history: both the slave patrols and the laws they enforced existed for the express purpose of controlling the Black population. There was no pretense of racial neutrality, and so there was less concern with the abstract aim of controlling “crime” than with the very concrete task of controlling Black people. Black people were, in a sense, criminalized—but more importantly, they were permanently deemed objects for control.
As cities industrialized, White workers formed another troublesome group. Efforts to control these new “dangerous classes” were more legalistic and impartial (in form, if not in application) than those directed against the slaves. Laws against vagrancy, gambling, prostitution, loitering, cursing, and drinking (the nineteenth-century equivalent of our current war on drugs) brought the habits of the poor into the jurisdiction of the police, and the police directed their suspicions accordingly. Thus, contrary to Harris’s account, racial profiling gave birth to the broader category of “criminal profiling”—not the other way around.
What may distinguish our contemporary notion of “profiling” from simple prejudice is the idea that suspicious characteristics can somehow be scientifically identified and formulated into a general type in order to rationally direct police suspicions. It is the war on drugs that has most recently popularized profiling, initially because of the work of Florida Highway Patrol officer, and later Volusia County sheriff, Bob Vogel. Vogel formulated a list of “cumulative similarities” that he used in deciding whether to search a vehicle. These included factors like demeanor, discrepancies in the vehicle’s paperwork, over-cautious driving, the model of the car, and the time of the trip. In the mid-1980s, after Vogel made several particularly impressive arrests, the DEA adopted similar techniques in its training of local law enforcement.42
The scientific basis of Vogel’s system is questionable—his “cumulative similarities” were based on a sample of thirty cases—and its application even more worrisome.43 While Vogel claims that race was never a factor in his approach, his deputies’ behavior tells a different story.44 Black people and Latinos represented 5 percent of the drivers on the roads his department patrolled. But according to a review of 148 hours of videotape from cameras mounted in squad cars, minorities made up 70 percent of the people stopped and 80 percent of those searched. Of the 1,100 drivers appearing on the tapes, only nine were issued tickets.45
Likewise, under “Operation Pipeline” the DEA told the police not to consider race as a factor, while continuously referencing the race of suspected drug dealers.46 Pipeline emphasized the use of pretext stops and “consent” searches (that is, searches lacking probable cause).47 The results were predictable. According to a 1999 report by the California legislature’s Task Force on Government Oversight, two-thirds of those stopped as part of Operation Pipeline were Latinos. The report noted the systematic nature of this bias:
It should be emphasized that this program has been conducted with the support of CHP [California Highway Patrol] management. Individual officers involved in these operations and training programs have been carrying out what they perceived to be the policy of the CHP, the Department of Justice, and the Deukmejian and Wilson Administrations. Thus we are not faced with “rogue” officers or individual, isolated instances of wrongdoing. The officers involved in these operations have been told repeatedly by their supervisors that they were doing their jobs exactly right.48
By 2000, the DEA had trained over 25,000 cops working for more than 300 agencies in forty-eight states.49
The Flawed Logic of Racial Profiling
The theoretical groundwork for racial profiling was in place long before the DEA popularized its current form. Writing in the middle of the twentieth century, LAPD Chief of Police William H. Parker defended the police saturation of minority neighborhoods. His views anticipate those supporting the use of other race-based police tactics. They are worth quoting at length:
Deployment is often heaviest in so-called minority sections of the city. The reason is statistical—it is a fact that certain racial groups, at the present time, commit a disproportionate share of the total crime. Let me make one point clear in that regard—a competent police administrator is fully aware of the multiple conditions which create this problem. There is no inherent physical or mental weakness in any racial stock which tends its [sic] toward crime. But—and this is a “but” which must be borne constantly in mind—police field deployment is not social agency activity. In deploying to suppress crime, we are not interested in why a certain group tends toward crime, we are interested in maintaining order. The fact that the group would not be a crime problem under different socio-economic conditions and might not be a crime problem tomorrow, does not alter today’s tactical necessities. Police deployment is concerned with effect, not cause.…
At the present time, race, color, and creed are useful statistical and tactical devices. So are age groupings, sex, and employment. If persons of one occupation, for some reason, commit more theft than average, then increased police attention is given to persons of that occupation. Discrimination is not a factor there. If persons of Mexican, Negro, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry, for some reason, contribute heavily to other forms of crime, police deployment must take that into account. From an ethnological point of view, Negro, Mexican, and Anglo-Saxon are unscientific breakdowns; they are a fiction. From a police point of view, they are a useful fiction and should be used as long as they remain useful.
The demand that the police cease to consider race, color, and creed is an unrealistic demand. Identification is a police tool, not a police attitude. If traffic violations run