One reason I liked to do police ride-alongs as a reporter was tofeel the visceral aspects of a job I often wrote about butotherwise knew only in the abstract.
Join a cop in pulling over a carload of people on a lonelyhighway in the middle of the night and your heart will race withthe knowledge that his jeopardy is your jeopardy. If he getssomebody's first bullet, you can guess who's likely to get thesecond.
I got an extra rush of anxiety one time while cruising with anIllinois trooper who stopped a big Lincoln for speeding onInterstate 255 near Collinsville. A radio message warned us the carwas wanted but did not immediately specify for what. The windowswere so deeply tinted that we could not even tell how many peoplewere inside " or whether anyone might be pointing a weapon atus.
It turned out to be a cooperative, petite, late-middle-agedwoman who had failed to appear in court on some minor warrant.
I think about that experience every time the subject of racialprofiling in traffic stops makes its way into the news. The officerbeside me had no way to know what the race of the driver would be.I'd say it was that way in a majority of the dozens of trafficstops I've witnessed from the passenger seat.
Now, I'm not an idiot. I do believe that everyone of every racedoes at least some kind of profiling " much of it subliminal andprobably often unfair. (This explains why women never flockedaround young Pat at parties.)
Worries about profiling prejudice by police prompted Missouri in2000 and Illinois in 2004 to start requiring officers to record therace of every driver they stop. Annual reports in both statescompare the results, by each jurisdiction, to the racial makeup ofits driving-age population.
The numbers consistently indicate that minorities are stoppeddisproportionately in many places, whites in some.
An obvious flaw is that the resident population may not reflectwho's really there. Some towns have malls or factories. Troy, Ill.,and Troy, Mo., are similar in racial makeup, but police in theformer patrol two major interstate highways and in the latternone.
Besides, no two groups can be counted on to do anything at thesame rate, including speeding or carrying drugs. If traffic ticketslisted bald versus hairy, or blue eyes versus green, I'm sure theresults would not match their proportions. So are the disparitiessignificant?
For years, the two states have just laid the numbers out there,with nobody paying much attention and the overall statistics comingin about the same.
Were the issue only traffic stops, we might dismiss thedisparities with a shrug.
But Missouri and Illinois also keep a record of the race ofdrivers asked to submit to a "consent search." It's where a cop hasa hunch about contraband and asks to look.
Not surprising: About 95 percent of motorists comply. (Who saysno to a badge and gun?) Rather surprising: Some folks haulingcontraband give consent as well, perhaps confident of their hidingplace or resigned to the arrival of a drug-sniffing dog to provideprobable cause to search anyway.
The consent search numbers show that police in both states askblack and Hispanic drivers at much higher rates than whites " yetthe searches of whites are significantly more likely to yieldcontraband. (In Illinois, whites were asked less than half as oftenas Hispanics, for example, but were caught with contraband 50percent more often.)
Those disparities are especially problematic since the officercan clearly see the race of the motorist at issue.
The Illinois Legislature passed a law, effective in 2008,establishing a panel to get to the bottom of things. It evenspecified how many of the 15 unpaid members would be legislators,bureaucrats, police officials and the like.
The result? Another disparity, I'm afraid. This one is betweenwhat government advertises and what it does. Neither Gov. RodBlagojevich nor Gov. Pat Quinn ever got around to appointing anyoneto do the job.
The next sets of statistics are due out June 1 in Missouri andJuly 1 in Illinois.
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