Racial profiling unnecessary, uneffective

When Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for resisting arrest July 16, racial profiling once again raised its ugly head. The next week during a presidential news conference about health care, a reporter asked President Barack Obama about the incident. Obama answered the question, saying Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” arresting a 58-year-old (black) man with a cane for breaking into his own home.

Hindsight tells us Gates used poor judgment in arguing with a police officer, Crowley used poor judgment for not leaving Gates’ home after seeing identification that showed the scholar really lived there and Obama used poor judgment in his choice of words at his news conference.

To separate himself from the incident, the president invited Gates and Crowley to the White House for beer last week to discuss the entire episode. Vice President Joe Biden joined the three men while an unknown number of news reporters, photographers and camera people hovered nearby.

In the end, Gates and Crowley agreed to disagree over the he-said, he-said confrontation.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been profiled. I have. It’s demeaning and embarrassing. It makes you mad. Angry isn’t a strong enough word.

All of us profile in some manner or to some degree. In many cases, the practice is justified. Advertisers use profiling to sell products. Minorities’ issue is with racial profiling.

For instance, black men driving expensive cars in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods are stopped on suspicions they stole the vehicles or are pushing drugs that pay for the fancy wheels. Similarly, since Sept. 11, 2001, Middle Easterners are imagined as terrorists and Hispanics are thought to be illegal immigrants.

Profiling, as we know it, must now change. The FBI on July 29 arrested seven people in a domestic terrorism plot in North Carolina. Most of the suspects appear to be white. An eighth suspect is still at large.

That case shows racial profiling doesn’t work. I suspect it’s only the “tip of the iceberg” that may later prove deadly.

According to profile experts in 2003, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Beltway Snipers, were supposed to be white. Both are black. If the FBI had issued an alert for North Carolinians to be on the lookout for Middle Eastern terrorists, how many North Carolina residents would have visualized possible terrorists as white American citizens?

All Americans who fly complain about long, slow-moving lines at airports. I think the delays will begin taking longer. Now that another incident – the North Carolina Eight – of racial profiling has been disproved, perhaps all law enforcement agencies will discontinue the practice.

One more thought on profiling and why it’s unnecessary. Why has there never been a case of a black law officer profiling and stopping a white person?

Whites don’t drive in wrong neighborhoods, carry drugs or ride in expensive-looking vehicles. Whites can drive anywhere they wish. None are drug addicts or pushers.

Oops, I just profiled them, and I was wrong. Profiling just doesn’t work.

Nelson Graves, of Augusta County, is a columnist for The News Virginian. E-mail him at .