Brent Staples . . . Even Americans who disapprove of racial profiling tend
to view it as a passing humiliation, with no broad social import.
But criminologists have long argued that profiling goes well beyond the
personal and exerts a substantial impact on the criminal justice process
and the broader social order as well. Speaking at a national conference last week, Dr. Dawn
Day, an addiction specialist from the Dogwood Center in Princeton, N.J.,
drew a connection between racial profiling of intravenous drug users and
the rapid spread of AIDS in the black community. The most conservative estimates suggest that white
intravenous drug users outnumber black users by at least 5 to 1.
Even so, drug sweeps tend to be concentrated in inner cities, which are
widely viewed as the sole source of the problem. Dr. Day's
calculations, based on Federal data, show 5 arrests for every 100 white
addicts, but 20 arrests for every 100 black addicts. Unworried about random searches and arrests, many white
addicts carry clean needles so that they can avoid sharing needles and
the risk of getting AIDS. But black addicts know that they are
vulnerable to random search and arrest and often choose not to carry
needles. Instead, they share the needles of strangers, getting
AIDS and other blood-borne diseases in the process. As a
consequence, the rate of HIV infection for black drug users is many
times that of whites. . . . Police
departments have historically justified profiling by arguing that it
leads to valid arrests. But the practice also exempts from
scrutiny the vast majority of drug users and couriers who are by
definition non-black. The race-based practice catches some of the
guilty, but it violates the lives of many more innocent people,
undermining law-enforcement credibility in minority neighborhoods.
Finally, the myth that drug crime is a "black" problem,
confined to ghettos, allows the culture to deceive itself about the vast
scope of the epidemic. |
