Pubdate: Mon, 11 Dec 2000
Source: Home News Tribune (NJ)
Copyright: 2000 Home News Tribune
Contact:  35 Kennedy Blvd. East Brunswick, NJ 08816
Website: http://www.thnt.com/hnt/
Author: David J. Harris

POLICE UNDERESTIMATE INTELLIGENCE OF RIVALS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Even if racial profiling "works," the practice assaults the basic
principles upon which our society is founded.

April 23, 1998, is an important date in New Jersey history. State
troopers John Hogan and James Kenna fired 11 shots into a van carrying
four unarmed Hispanic and African-American men.

If guns or drugs had been found in the van, the entire matter would
have been discussed with a point of view much more favorable to the
state police.

This incident forced the state to admit that troopers were stopping
motorists based upon race and ethnicity.

The perverse "beauty" of racial profiling is clearly manifest in this
case. Officers who prejudge minorities to be outlaws target them
without probable cause and search vehicles for evidence of a crime.

While the practice dates back to the 1980s and beyond, the extreme
actions of Hogan and Kenna caused the issue to blow up in the face of
Gov. Christie Whitman. But Democrats are equally guilty of benign neglect.

As a law-enforcement strategy in the "war" on drugs, racial profiling
is an abject failure.

To this day, police agencies continue to underestimate the
intelligence of their adversaries. If untrained motorists are puzzled
by the number of blacks they observe being stopped on the Turnpike,
dealers in the trillion-dollar illegal-drug trade have eyes, too.

When they are forced to use the Turnpike, they employ people with
white skin and white hair as mules. White men in three-piece business
suits, grandmothers with grandchildren, and women dressed as nuns,
provide cover for the side that is winning the drug "war."

Operators would have to be very ignorant to hire young Hispanic and
black men to move their products on the Turnpike between Delaware and
New York.

Within the system that promotes state troopers based upon volume of
arrests rather than on quality, drivers carrying small amounts of
drugs for personal use fall victim to profile stops. These arrests
make good press releases. But they do not hurt organized criminal
enterprises that control illegal drugs in America.

Nothing reveals the superficial and bigoted core values of our society
better than racial profiling and the "war" on drugs. How else can we
explain our indifference to the fact that prison construction is a
leading growth industry in a nation that claims to be a democracy?

Two million poor and semiliterate citizens are locked up in places
that pay guards more than school teachers whose good work assists in
preventing their students from going to jail.

One in every 150 Americans is behind bars. Personal drug use and
mental illness account for more than 50 percent of the prison population.

Racial profiling is a cruel weapon that bludgeons the foundations of
democracy. Under our rules, the victims are not required to wear a
Yellow Star of David. They are labeled at birth.

"Sinner man, where you gonna run to on Judgment Day?"
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