It's Criminal to Profile

In a recent press conference, Rochester Police Chief James Sheppard endorsed racial and other kinds of profiling--except that he called it "aggressive pro-active policing". A local writer offers this bit of research around the issue of profiling and why it's wrong. -Rochester Indymedia

What is "criminal profiling"?

On June 27th, 2011, Rochester police chief James Sheppard held a press conference to answer questions about the unlawful arrest of local Rochester resident Emily Good while she was filming a traffic stop in front of her home in the 19th Ward in May of this year. During the conference, the chief maintained that his officer was not using racial profiling, but was instead using "criminal profiling" to determine if the black man in the traffic stop should be detained. Sheppard asserted that there was nothing wrong with criminal profiling and that the RPD would continue the practice with his support.

Sheppard offered no specifics at the time about criminal profiling, so Rochester Indymedia reviewed what is available on the subject. Turns out that what the officer who arrested Emily was doing what is known as "Drug Courier Profiling" (Bovard 1999). The scientific sounding methodology of "criminal profiling," which Sheppard used to describe Emily's arresting officer's actions, conjures up the image of a more socially acceptable Sherlock Holmes story or a TV crime procedural investigator "reading" the evidence at a crime scene to deduce who their yet uncaught arch nemesis might be.

Criminal profiling that involves deduction is actually used less often, and certainly never used by a patrolling police officer out in the field. "Deductive Criminal Profiling" involves gathering a set of physical evidence from a single incident, such as from a homicide crime scene, and then examining it carefully after the fact to see if it has any of the earmarks of a particular type of perpetrator (Wood). There is nothing proactive or preemptive about it. By definition, deductive profiling works by eliminating physical evidence which is not relevant to the case.

Still under the rubric of "criminal profiling," but in reality its polar opposite is "Inductive Criminal Profiling." Inductive profiling generalizes a group of characteristics to a specific suspect based on statistical data collected from surprisingly anecdotal sources, like interviews with perpetrators after conviction and newspaper articles about crimes in the past (Wood). Again, this kind of profiling is not proactive or preemptive, and takes place after the fact of a crime with the hope of narrowing the field of potential suspects.

"Drug Courier Profiling," which Emily's arresting officer was using during the traffic stop in her neighborhood, is like a bastard child of the real criminal profiling described above. It is also nearly as arbitrary and objectionable as the racial profiling which Emily feared was happening on her street, and which moved Emily to document on video before her arrest. In fact, because of the well known bias against people of color in our criminal justice system, in most cases, Drug Courier Profiling and racial profiling are the same thing.

Drug Courier Profiling is a civil liberties disaster of the first order with a catch-all set of random characteristics and behaviors used as an excuse by the police, preemptively and prior to the commission of an actual crime, to detain and search just about anyone they choose (Bovard 1999). A clear violation of our 4th Amendment rights regarding unreasonable searches, this kind of profiling targets blacks and Hispanics, airport or public transportation travelers, and anyone driving a car (Bovard 1999). That's just about all of us. Problem is, most of the time the police are wrong about the drug involvements of the people they detain with this kind of profiling. For example, in 1989 (even before the current TSA debacle), DEA agents pulled aside 600 people at the Buffalo regional airport as possible drug couriers, and 590 those were innocent (Bovard 1999).

Using absurd technicalities to stop and search cars and drivers, which the RPD officer was doing with the man in the car out in front of Emily's house while "profiling," is an all too common practice with many police departments. One law enforcement agency in Pennsylvania, over the course of three years stopped blacks and Hispanics driving through or near their town because of a laughable code prohibiting the display rabbits' feet, dice, or air fresheners on the rear-view mirror, and then searched the cars for drugs (Bovard 1999). While driving home from church in the same area of PA, a group of black women testified that the police officer who stopped and searched them told them they were being detained because they were, "young, black, and driving 'a nice car'" (Brovard 1999).

This same department showed that 96 percent of the traffic stops over a six-month period by one police officer were of cars driven by blacks. The Delaware County DA in this PA jurisdiction excused the patrolman's racial profiling by saying, "Everybody knows that the drug trade in [adjacent] Chester, Philadelphia, and Wilmington is controlled by blacks. It's a truism." This PA township, as you might expect, was sued for these types of searches, whether you want to call it criminal or racial profiling, and paid out $220,000 to 40 black and Hispanic drivers who had been illegally searched (Bovard 1999). It is not a stretch to conclude that in most cases, Drug Courier Profiling is racial profiling.

In the future we would expect Rochester Police Chief Sheppard to avoid obfuscating and diversion in referring to preemptive traffic stops by police looking for alleged drug traffickers as criminal profiling. Sheppard has been given a tremendous position of responsibility in our community and as such we hold him to a high standard of truthfulness and accuracy when addressing the public.

(references)

"Drug-Courier Profiles: Or, Why We Are All Guilty"
by James Bovard, November 1999
http://www.fff.org/freedom/1199e.asp

Outline of Memorandum of Law on Admissibility of "Criminal Profile" Evidence
http://www.terriwoodlawoffice.com/pdfdocs/Criminal_Profile_Evidence.pdf