Racist Policing, Again

Racist profiling in law enforcement has struck again. Less than two months after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, the release of a dashboard-camera video showing a white South Carolina highway patrolman shooting an unarmed black motorist should remind America that the case of Ferguson, Mo., is not an uncommon one. Racist policing is a systemic problem in a national criminal justice system that all too often demonstrates injustice rather than justice.

In the video, the police officer, Sean Groubert, asks Levar Jones for his driver’s license after pulling Jones over for an alleged seat belt violation. Jones reaches into his pocket, realizes his license is still in the car, and quickly ducks into his car to retrieve it. Believing Jones is reaching for a gun, Groubert yells for him to get out of the car, then opens fire before Jones even turns around. Groubert fires four shots, the final one after Jones has already raised his hands above his head. To anyone watching the video, the horrific excess of Groubert’s actions is unquestionable.

It would be easy to dismiss Groubert’s actions as those of a rogue cop, a mere bad apple. We could condemn him individually and send him to jail for his actions (assuming a jury convicts him, which is by no means guaranteed). We could applaud the rapid response of the South Carolina Highway Patrol in firing and arresting Groubert, and we could forget about the incident.

But to do so would be to ignore the structural racism, the socially dominant stereotypes that caused Groubert to see a gun-wielding criminal where there was no one but an innocent, unarmed civilian.

As Groubert confronted Jones, he carried with him the stereotype of what legal scholar Katheryn Russell-Brown has termed the “criminalblackman.” The result of decades of the War on Drugs, in which politicians and the media have constructed and reinforced the idea that black men are dangerous criminals, the concept of the criminalblackman is deeply ingrained in the psyche of our society.

Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” explains that “law enforcement officials, no less than the rest of us, have been exposed to the racially charged political rhetoric and media imagery associated with the drug war.” Informed by such a prominent stereotype, deplorable police errors are essentially inevitable.

So, with Jones’s blackness being Groubert’s only reason for thinking he might be armed, the police officer immediately assumed that Jones was reaching into his car not for his license but for a weapon. As this rationale is obviously unacceptable, Groubert’s lawyer has attempted to defend his client by stating that Jones reached into the car “aggressively.” While Jones did turn quickly, there can be little doubt that, had a white man acted in the same manner, his actions would not have been described as aggressive, the police officer would not have assumed he was armed, and he certainly would not have been fired upon.

The obvious racial profiling of the police officer must also call into question the premise on which Jones was pulled over in the first place. It is not clear whether Jones did indeed commit a seat belt violation, but even if he did, there is a substantial chance he would not have been pulled over had he been white. Police officers consistently use minor traffic violations as a pretext to stop minorities—but not whites—and search for drugs.

In her book, Alexander cites several studies to demonstrate this phenomenon. One of these, conducted on the New Jersey Turnpike in the 1990s, shows that “15 percent of all drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike were racial minorities, yet 42 percent of all stops and 73 percent of all arrests were of black motorists—despite the fact that blacks and whites violated traffic laws at almost exactly the same rate.” In addition, whites were actually more likely to be found with drugs, ruling out drug policing as an acceptable excuse for this race-based harassment.

Levar Jones was not seriously injured, but he could easily have been killed for driving while black and moving too quickly to produce his license. Racist policing, whether in the form of something as commonplace as excessive enforcement of traffic violations or of something as disturbing as the unwarranted use of force, must end. It is not enough to punish overtly racist police officers. It is not even enough to outlaw policing practices that involve racial profiling. These incidents can only stop when our society commits itself to destroying the unjust stereotype that sees black men as criminals. Only then can the Michael Browns and Levar Joneses of America go about their day without the fear of being shot by police officers.

David F. Clifton ’17 is a Crimson editorial comper in Adams House.