That human beings profile one another isn’t surprising. But when certain social, class, and cultural norms and values collide during confrontations between police and civilians, those instincts sometimes take on a more sinister guise.
Law professors and police officials dissected lessons learned from last summer’s international controversy sparked by the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a recent Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston forum on the role of race in American policing.
One of the major challenges the incident illuminated is defining just what racial profiling means for ordinary citizens on the one hand and the police on the other. “Racial profiling has come to mean negative feelings about government agents, particularly police officers,” said Tracey Meares, a Yale Law school professor who is a member of a Cambridge commission reviewing Gates’s arrest.
Most citizens are looking for neutrality when they have an encounter with police, Meares added, and officers need to appreciate the social and cultural norms and values held by various racial and ethnic groups that may differ from their own.
“What people really want is to be treated benevolently and with respect,” she said.
Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts pointed out that successful African-American may “live in a fancy place in a nice part of the city,” but there is a unspoken belief among men like himself that for many people, including police, that “you’re still a boy.”
“The police are on the front lines of an issue that is much larger than [the individual police officer],” he said.
There is also a need to better understand minor crimes like disorderly conduct, the charge levied against Professor Gates. In the United States, there are more arrests for disorderly conduct than all other violent crimes combined.
“It’s telling that it took a disorderly conduct arrest to provoke this type of discussion,” said Christopher Stone, a professor of criminal justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
The average American would also benefit from a better understanding of how police operate, Batts said. For example, he explained, police officers in traffic stops first want to get control of a situation by establishing that the occupants of a vehicle don’t have guns or knives.
Once it’s determined that they don’t, conversations can begin. “People have a right to question us,” said Batts. “We have to have the patience to a certain extent to allow that to occur.”
“The very small area of police tactics is something everybody should be aware of,” said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, who spoke during the question-and-answer period.
A Liberian immigrant once told Davis that when police stop a driver in Liberia, it is considered a sign of respect to get out of one’s car to go and meet officers behind the vehicle, Then, the person can reach down to retrieve into a sock to retrieve IDs (which is where many people keep them).
In the US, of course, attempting to exit a car before an officer makes the request could have deadly consequences. Lowell officers, especially those who specialize in tactics, “went nuts,” according to Davis.
Davis, who was singled out by panel members as one of the most progressive thinkers in law enforcement in the country, said after the forum that that Boston police are making a street-by-street, block-by-block effort to foster better community-police relations.
Boston police are also using social networking tools to target certain groups, such as young professionals who don’t have much interaction with law enforcement. “We’re not going to get to everybody, but the more people we get to, the better they understand, Davis said.
As for Professor Gates and Sargeant James Crowley, the arresting officer, they have kept to their bargain to continue their conversation beyond last summer’s beer summit with President Obama. Last week, they met at a Cambridge bar. Neither man has commented on what transpired during their tête-à-tête.
