Opinion: Defining racial profiling
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In Monday’s Opinion pages, LAPD Lt. Sunil Dutta recounts a story from his rookie days in 1998 when he was accused of racial profiling. As a former liberal academic-turned-officer, the experience shook him up. He argues that there’s a difference between “true racial profiling, in which people are targeted solely because of race or ethnicity,” and profiling “based on all actionable intelligence, which includes race as one of many criteria.”
Consider the gang officers in Foothill Division, where I work. Each day, they go out in the field looking for Latino males of a certain age who dress in a particular way, have certain tattoos on their bodies and live in an area where street gangs flourish. Does that mean they are engaging in racial profiling? No. They are using crime data to identify possible suspects. […] If officers get information that a 6-foot-tall Asian man with a Fu Manchu mustache committed a robbery, they are of course going to target their search to tall Asian men with Fu Manchu mustaches. If the suspect is an 80-year-old white woman, the search won’t focus on young black men. Officers are trained to use all the data available to them in apprehending criminals.
The LAPD has worked hard to get its act together since the early 1990s. But what explains why more black people get arrested for marijuana use when, in fact, more white people smoke pot?
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-- Alexandra Le Tellier
