Drive-by racism

Racial profiling doesn't get much attention in Boston -- but it's a serious problem. What will it take to get police departments to deal with it?

by Kristen Lombardi

PULLED OVER: Kenneth Bridges, a doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, was questioned by police while on his way to work. "The stop was made because I'm black and behind the wheel in Brookline," he says.

Benito Martinez knew the road like the back of his hand. The 53-year-old radio producer had often commuted from Boston to Chelsea via the quiet, less traveled Broadway Street bridge in Charlestown -- until events of one evening forever altered his chosen path.

Last September, while navigating Broadway, the calm, bespectacled Puerto Rican native noticed two white officers in an Everett Police Department cruiser fall into traffic behind his sedan as he neared the Boston city limits. At first he thought nothing of it. But then he turned right, and the officers followed. He let a driver merge ahead of him, and the officers lingered. "I had a bad feeling," he recalls, "like maybe they were out to get me."

Martinez's suspicions appear to have been justified. As soon as he crossed into Everett, the officers turned on their blue lights. When Martinez asked why he'd been stopped, the officers, he says, "came at me like a pit bull," beaming a flashlight inside his car, threatening arrest. He was later issued a ticket for speeding in a 20-miles-per-hour zone.

It was an unsettling experience, made more so by the fact that Martinez believes he was the victim of an old police practice: racial profiling. He filed a complaint with the Everett police and is appealing his ticket in court. "I have a right to drive," he says, "without fearing being stopped just because I'm Hispanic."

Technically, racial profiling is the police practice of making traffic stops based on the race of the driver, in the belief that most crimes are committed by people of color. But the phrase has fast become a catchall to describe the instant link made by police between race and crime. Witness the January 28 shooting death of off-duty Providence police officer Cornel Young Jr. Minority leaders charged that "racial profiling" had prompted two fellow officers to assume that Young, who was black, was a suspect; they gunned him down when he drew a weapon in an attempt to break up a fight. Parallels were made, swiftly and inevitably, between the Young slaying and the brutal 1995 beating of Boston police sergeant Michael Cox, a black officer, by colleagues who mistook him for a suspect. The brutal attack and its subsequent cover-up involved a number of officers -- including, it's suspected, other black officers. The Cox case, like Young's, shows what can happen when police see racial minorities as potential criminals. It also sheds light on the complexity of the situation: both white and black cops can engage in racial profiling.

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For many racial minorities in Boston, profiling has become a fact of life. Boston teenagers, in particular, have learned to anticipate a certain tango with police officers -- as was revealed in a recent survey by a South End youth organization called Teen Empowerment. The survey, which asked 300 primarily black and Hispanic teenagers throughout the city about police encounters, found that 210 of them had been stopped "without reason." Half of those had been stopped and searched.

"The rule is young people are often treated unfairly," says Stanley Pollack, who directs Teen Empowerment. Youths may not think of what happens to them in terms of profiling, he adds, "but they know they're being treated this way because of their skin color."

Joshua Richardson, for one, has come to think of himself as a walking target for cops. As a young black male, the 15-year-old Dorchester resident cannot forget what happened one night last year, when he and his 17-year-old brother strolled home along Bowdoin Avenue. Two officers in a cruiser crept up behind them and then called out, "You have any contraband?"

"No," Richardson replied.

The officers, both white, stopped the brothers anyway. Richardson was placed against a wall, his legs apart, his arms outstretched. "My brother was flipping because they were searching me for no reason," he recalls. "They were taking things out of my pockets. They took my cell phone, they opened my pen knife."

After digging through his pockets, the officers, empty-handed, released Richardson. After he returned home, he relayed the incident to his mother, who later filed a complaint.

The experience, though fleeting, left an indelible impression on Richardson. "If you got braids, a hoodie, and baggy jeans in my neighborhood, the cops are gonna be after you," he says wryly.

Ovi Cruz would agree. The Dorchester resident, a Hispanic teenager, says he and his friends are hassled by police so often he can recite the drill: cops stop you; they ask where you live, whether you have tattoos, why you like the color blue. "It's always the same," he says. Take the time Cruz took his Chihuahua out for a walk last summer. Making his way through Malcolm X park, he happened upon his "boys" hanging out, chatting, near the roadside. But it wasn't long before, he says, "the cops seen us and bum-rushed my boys" in search of drugs.

For teens like Cruz, this type of racial profiling does more than spark a sense of being boxed in. As he puts it, "When I get treated like this, it makes me feel degraded."

Young people aren't the only ones who feel degraded. In April 1999, 150 black and Hispanic motorists, among them professors and preachers, converged at the State House to recount tales of humiliating run-ins with police. One after another testified at a three-hour legislative hearing on a bill sponsored by Senator Dianne Wilkerson that would force local police departments to compile statistics on the race, gender, and age of drivers who are stopped. A health official recalled being pulled over four times in Winchester, just two blocks from his home. A car-wash owner spoke of being beaten in Boston by MBTA police. Even a federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent said he was stopped and detained by two Reading cops, despite the fact he'd shown his credentials.

Kenneth Bridges, a hematologist at Brig-ham and Women's Hospital, also appeared before legislators that day to describe how racial profiling can haunt law-abiding professionals. On a Sunday evening several years ago, Bridges, who lives in Newton, was driving down Beacon Street in Brookline. He was headed toward the hospital to check on cell experiments, dressed casually in a sweatshirt and jeans. As he approached Coolidge Corner, he spotted the blue lights behind him.

Suddenly, he says, "I was on the alert." What he'd learned growing up black in America flashed through his mind: keep your hands on the wheel; don't reach for anything; don't get out of the car.

The officer, Bridges recalls, addressed him in a suspicious tone. Claiming that he'd been speeding, the officer requested Bridges's license, and then bluntly inquired, "Where are you going and why?"

For Bridges, the implication was all too apparent: "I shouldn't be there, I didn't belong." After he identified himself, Bridges was let go without a warning -- a clear sign, he says, that "the stop was made because I'm black and behind the wheel in Brookline."

Testimony like Bridges's has helped bring the issue home for Boston. The anecdotes, at least, suggest a real problem, which victims of the practice believe is widespread. "It's bigger than we think," says Miguel Gonzalez, a Chelsea resident with his own profiling tale. (He and two other Hispanic motorists were stopped by MBTA police while making an illegal turn into the Orient Heights station, but white drivers making the same turn were not.) "Too many people never file a complaint."

Anecdotes, however, can go only so far. They may point to a problem, but they don't illuminate its extent. Nor can they tell us whether the accounts reflect actual law-enforcement practices or, rather, the perception on the part of minorities that officers discriminate based on race.

Without statistics, then, it's hard to say how severe a problem profiling has become. "Anecdotes are good for explaining how profiling changes people's lives," says Amy Farrell, who studies the topic for a federally funded project at Northeastern University. But, she adds, "Without data collection, we are in a world of our own."

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One way to address racial profiling is through Wilkerson's legislation, which would require Massachusetts police officers to collect data for all traffic stops -- even those not resulting in citations. Supporters believe data collection is a crucial step in verifying the problem, and will also force police departments to examine their motivations and thus become more accountable for their actions. And data collection can be done now. "You have to start somewhere," says Leonard Alkins, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, "and build on that."

It's a step more and more states are willing to take. In April 1999, North Carolina, facing a host of discrimination lawsuits, became the first state to pass a law requiring that racial data be gathered at traffic stops. Maryland soon followed suit, after a study found that 73 percent of drivers pulled over along Interstate 95 were black, but that blacks made up only 17.5 percent of all drivers. Data collection has since surfaced -- sometimes voluntarily, sometimes as the result of legislation -- in New Jersey, California, Florida, and Ohio.

But back home, the Wilkerson bill, which mirrors legislation adopted elsewhere, has turned into a political nightmare. Ever since last year's hearing, legislators have sat on the bill by placing it "in a study," where it will remain unless legislators decide to debate it by the end of the current legislative session in July. At the same time, legislators have proposed expanding the state's seat-belt law to make seat-belt violations equal to other violations -- a move that Wilkerson and her allies fear will exacerbate racial profiling.

The legislative stonewalling isn't surprising. The party line among police officers, after all, is that profiling, though wrong, is not a pervasive problem, and so a state law mandating data collection isn't necessary.

As Wilkerson says, "Legislators are afraid to touch this."

But for police officers, resistance to data retrieval is rooted in legitimate concerns about police work, as well as in doubts about whether it provides meaningful information. Jim Machado, who lobbies for the 300-strong Massachusetts Police Association, argues that collecting racial data makes for a more cumbersome process that, in the end, doesn't illustrate much.

"If we're in Roxbury," he explains, "chances are we'll stop more blacks. If we're in a Hispanic part of town, chances are we'll stop more Hispanics. Does that tell you we're profiling?"

Machado, a veteran officer in Fall River, admits he's perturbed by a bill that assumes police engage in profiling. He doesn't consider the problem widespread. "Isolated incidents occur," he concedes, "but all law enforcement should not be accused of profiling."

James Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern, questions whether data collection presents anything other than "faulty information." The mere fact that more minorities than whites are stopped doesn't necessarily point to profiling, he says. Black and Hispanic motorists could, say, drive one particular route more often, or they could have a propensity for speeding.

"You need to control for the variables unrelated to race," Fox explains. Except in scientific experiments, collecting racial data, he says, "is not the way to study the problem."

His comments echo the views of those in law enforcement who see racial profiling as good police work. Defenders of the practice have long maintained that race matters in crime fighting, to black cops as well as white. For them, the reason has less to do with bigotry than with common sense: statistics show that minorities commit a disproportionate percentage of certain crimes. Black males age 14 to 24, for instance, make up 1.1 percent of the national population yet commit more than 28 percent of homicides. Blacks and Hispanics, it's also believed, represent the backbone of the country's heroin and cocaine networks. In areas where racial minorities commit more crimes, defenders of profiling argue, police are justified in scrutinizing them closely.

Nevertheless, not one officer interviewed for this article would espouse profiling as a legitimate tool. Machado even stresses otherwise: "No one condones racial profiling," he says.

Even so, organizations such as the ACLU and NAACP have stepped up campaigns dealing with the problem. They have begun compiling their own cases of racial profiling. And they've met with the state's attorney general, Tom Reilly, to elicit help in encouraging local police departments to collect data voluntarily -- a fairly daunting task, since only Brookline and Provincetown now do so.

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These efforts have not gone unnoticed. Indeed, they've helped prompt a rather remarkable act of self-reflection on the part of law-enforcement officials. In March 1999, Police Commissioner Paul Evans convened a roundtable of 20 police chiefs from Boston and nearby cities and towns -- including Cambridge, Chelsea, and Brookline -- to discuss racial profiling and other issues facing law enforcement today. Last summer, the group signed a resolution declaring that their agencies would not "endorse, train, teach, support, or condone any type of bias stereotyping or racial profiling."

As Massachusetts State Police colonel John Difava, who helped draft the resolution, explains, "Police managers have stepped forward, and I cannot remember a more unified front."

"It is an important first step," says Ann-Marie Doherty, a superintendent with the Boston Police Department. "But we cannot let our actions cease with the resolution." Today, Doherty notes, the roundtable is examining computer programs that make it easier for police departments to collect and analyze racial data. So the Boston Police Department, which now conducts periodic reviews of traffic stops, expects to install "some kind of tracking" device by year's end.

More important, the roundtable has led to beefed-up training efforts. In January, the Boston Police Department launched a program revisiting proper procedures for officers stopping motorists. And Difava has even brought in New Jersey troopers to discuss practices there.

"We're trying to stop a behavior," Difava says. "It's up to police managers to instill appropriate training."

Of course, racial profiling will continue as long as racism continues. Which is why police, minority leaders, and civil-rights advocates agree that what it takes to root out profiling is frank talk about race relations. The Reverend Jeffrey Brown, who helped found the highly successful Ten Point Coalition, sums up the sentiment: "Never underestimate the importance of dialogue as a process for community restoration."

It's a valid point, for sure. But because those pushing to end profiling are pushing to end the divisive legacy of racism, it's hard not to wonder whether people -- specifically, people involved in law enforcement -- will be moved to continue the dialogue after the Wilkerson legislation expires.

Says one long-time activist in the black community: "The culture of law enforcement is to remain silent on race issues. We'll see if that changes."

Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.