|
CONCLUSION
David A. Harris
THE STORIES, THE
STATISTICS, AND THE LAW:
WHY "DRIVING WHILE BLACK" MATTERS
84 Minnesota Law Review 265-326 (1999)
(Permission Requested, citations omitted)
|
| Everyone wants criminals caught.
Few feel this with more urgency than African-Americans, who
are so often the victims of crime. But we must choose our
methods carefully. As a country, we must strive to avoid
police practices that impose high costs on law abiding
citizens, and that skew those costs heavily on the basis of
race.
African-Americans clearly feel aggrieved
by pretextual traffic stops. It is virtually impossible to
find black people who do not feel that they have experienced
racial profiling. The statistics presented here show that
this is more than just the retelling of stories based on
isolated instances of police behavior. Rather, the patterns
in the data are strong, even when the data are not ideal.
These experiences have a deep psychological and emotional
impact on the individuals involved, and they also have a
significant connection to many of the most basic problems in
criminal justice and race.
Surely a solution will not be easy to
achieve. There are, after all, many among the law
enforcement community and its supporters who disfavor even
the most basic first steps toward an understanding of the
problem through the collection of comprehensive, accurate
data. Yet it is with these same people that the best hope
for any solution rests. Changes in law enforcement policies,
training, and supervision, and a determination from the top
to end race-based policing are where the effort to come to
grips with this problem will ultimately succeed or fail. And
lest we lose hope, the first effort to legislate the
collection of data--Rep. Conyers' H.R. 118--has spawned a
dozen imitators on the state level.
The bottom line is that we--every citizen
and every police officer--must realize that "driving
while black" is a problem not just for
African-Americans, but for every American who believes in
basic fairness. When blacks feel like criminals whenever
they do something as common as driving a car, and when they
feel so distrustful of the police that they will not believe
officers testifying in court, things have come to a
dangerous point. "Driving while black" destroys
the ideal that holds us together as a nation: equal justice
under law. And when that goes, we are all in trouble.
|
