Racial profiling debate not over

Racial profiling debate not over
San Francisco State University professor Antwi Akom can identify with prominent Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates.
He remembers the moment four years ago when, he says, campus police arrested him as he left his office with an armful of books. Akom says he hadn't done anything illegal.
Still, he says, police charged him with resisting arrest after he questioned why they stopped him. Six months later, the charges were dropped.
The university said at the time of the incident that Akom was the aggressor and was not racially profiled.
"The only crime I committed was being a black man on a university campus at night," says Akom, who teaches environmental sociology and urban education. "That's not a crime, and it's not worthy of criminal suspicion. ... Many of us are still psychologically damaged to this day from the trauma of constant criminal suspicion."
A day after police in Cambridge, Mass., dropped disorderly conduct charges against Gates, the incident has reignited tensions in the long debate over racial profiling.
Gates was arrested July 16 when police went to his home after a report of a break-in. Police say they arrested Gates after he became argumentative when an officer demanded identification.
Gates' supporters say the incident was a classic case of racial profiling. "There's a sense that this can happen at any time, anywhere at any moment to anyone," says John Powell, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.
For generations, the relationship between police and minority communities has been fractured by accusations that police single out minorities based only on their skin color and use excessive force against them.
No national system tracks allegations of racial profiling. At least 13 states require tracking of police stops by race, says Reginald Shuford, an ACLU attorney who successfully sued the Maryland State Police for racially profiling motorists.
He advocates requiring all agencies to report stops, searches and arrests by race.
The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the nation's largest police union, disagrees.
"I don't think there is any evidence of systemic racial profiling that requires a national tracking system," says Jim Pasco, executive director of the FOP, which has 325,000 members at more than 2,000 police agencies. "Racial profiling can't exist in a police department unless managers allow it to.
"The whole idea that something was wrong with an officer asking for (Gates') ID is at variance with common sense," Pasco says. "If I was doing this at my house and a police officer asked me for my ID, I'd have no problem giving it to him and it would be over."
Powell says progress against racial profiling was made in the 1990s as more police agencies began to track stops by race.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, however, concerns about homeland security trumped concerns of racial or religious profiling, Powell says.
Big city police officials say the Gates case underscores a legacy of mistrust.
"In the minority communities, this will reinforce their worst instincts regarding the police," Miami Police Chief John Timoney says. "I won't be surprised if the African-American community is going to say, 'See!' "
But Timoney says it's important to note in the Gates incident that officers were responding to a citizen's report of a possible crime. "This wasn't something the cop initiated, like a traffic stop," he says. "The cop was responding to a call. When you get a call, you've got to go."
Southfield, Mich., Police Chief Joe Thomas, an African American who oversees the police department in the racially diverse suburb of Detroit, says the Gates incident showed a lack of training for the police officer. But he didn't let Gates off the hook, either.
"The professor also played the race card and the police officer's emotions got involved," he says.
The Gates incident is a reminder to others with similar stories.
Tedarrell Muhammad, 36, says he believes he was racially profiled eight months ago when, he says, police stopped him in his driveway and forced him to the ground at gunpoint. Muhammad, who is black, lives in the largely white Memphis suburb of Horn Lake, Miss..
"They said (the vehicle) was a stolen car," he recalls. "It was a rental van. I had the rental agreement right there on the dash."
Muhammad says the experience was humiliating. "Mr. Gates now gets to see what his people are really going through," he says. "He's at the pinnacle of success and look at what happened to Henry Louis Gates."
Contributing: Kathleen Gray of the Detroit Free Press and Chris Joyner of TheClarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss.