Sunday, September 30, 2001
TU pro-seminar looks at racial profiling
By Ryan Good
Staff Writer
Racial profiling is not a practice of police departments.
Steve Young, national president of the Grand Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, delivered that message to a group of students Saturday evening at Tiffin University's pro-seminar lecture series.
"I don't believe the police as a whole practice racial profiling," Young told the students gathered, adding that it does not help communities or police departments that practice it. "It's not a police practice. We don't teach it."
The idea, Young said, came from outside the law enforcement community.
"The media fails in their responsibility to report life as it happens," Young said, who is also a lieutenant with the Marion, Ohio, Police department. He added that the term racial profiling didn't exist in police procedure until it was used in the media.
"They fail miserably," he said, adding that the problem of racial profiling was mostly created by coverage of white officers shooting black citizens. He also stated that coverage of officers of the same race shooting citizens in police situations gets no coverage.
Media coverage, Young said, also can change quickly.
"The cops go from bad to heroes overnight," he said afterward, citing the Sept. 11 tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C. "Now all of the sudden people love them."
When the topic of racial profiling came up, so did tempers in the room.
"The argument on pattern of practice, it's a management problem. It's not with the cop in the cruiser," Young said during the exchange. "We had six officers do exactly what they were told to do," he said calmly about the recent shooting of a black man by a white police officer in Cincinnati.
The blame for such incidents, which Young said are not as common as believed, goes far beyond the officer pulling the trigger.
"What's going to happen to the captain who gave the order... what about the mayor whose politics brought the problem to the forefront?" Young said.
He also told those in attendance that criticism of the judge who acquitted the officer must be done with care.
"You can criticize the system when you don't get the outcome you want." Young said. "Is it fair for this judge or any judge to acquit the officer? If it's this judge, you may argue that he has a personal bias. If it's any judge, then you've raised questions about the criminal justice system."
Young also argued to the students that crime is a direct effect of economics. He said that the lower the income is in a neighborhood, the more crime there is, regardless of the racial groups represented in those neighborhoods.
"Does it have anything to do with calls on the radio where crimes have been committed?" Young posed to the group.
Young also said, to prove his point, that after the riots in Cincinnati police pulled out of the neighborhoods where citizens accused them of profiling.
"There were 60-some shootings. They were black on black crimes," the lieutenant said, adding that those shootings got very little coverage.
Young did say, however, that the problem exists.
"Do some officers cross the line? Sure. You can teach people the right thing to do, but that doesn't mean they do it," Young said. But "race is never enough reason to take action."