Protect Us From Profiles

DURING the mid-1970s, a "drugcourier profile" was developed by the Drug Enforcement Administration to help federal agents identify possible traffickers. According to the DEA a "typical" drug runner is someone inappropriately dressed man with a big roll of cash who acts nervous around police. Unfortunately, this technique, which has led to scores of arrests across the country, is leading to the violation or infringement upon our basic civil rights.

Police and other drug enforcement officials have the power to stop and question anyone who fits the profile. While specific races are not named, law enforcement officials have judged it reasonable to suspect Blacks and Hispanics of being drug runners, since a majority of smugglers belong to these two races.

To think that this has not led to the perpetration of racial stereotypes as a basis for discrimination is naive. Last month, LeVar Burton, the television actor currently starring on the new Star Trek, was stopped in California for no apparent reason except that he was black and driving a BMW.

Police use traffic violations to apprehend suspected drug runners and bypass the constitutional protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. Because any person who even remotely resembles the stereotypical drug runner can be stopped almost on a whim, this technique can be subject to the most flagrant abuses.

A person who is stopped by the police does not have to submit to questions and searches, but the choice may not be there. It is being said that those who do undergo interrogations and searches "voluntarily" may be more than persuasively coerced.

The vague nature of the profile lends itself very easily to change and adaptation to almost any situation. Too much is left to the discretion of the drug agents, while the reasons for arrest vary from one extreme to the other. Some agents find suspicious those who leave an airplane first, some suspect those who come off last, others look at those who leave in the middle. Being overdressed or underdressed, leaving very late at night or early in the morning are all reasons for suspicion.

There is presently a case pending before the Supreme Court challenging the use of profiles. The Court is expected to uphold the technique. Its previous decisions have sanctioned the informal questioning that profiling is supposed to engender. But the line between coercive and noncoercive questioning is often blurred by law enforcement officers who at best are guilty of zealousness, and at worst racial prejudice.

It is true that America is facing a pressing problem due to the pervasive use and abuse of drugs. A priority for law enforcement officials should be stopping the drug traffickers. But the protection of civil rights and the abolition of racial prejudice is essential to our own conception of ourselves as just human beings. To pursue one relentlessly at the cost of the other should not be sanctioned, and a balance must be sought, one that does not include stereotypical profiles which have police with excessive power over our daily lives.