'No evidence' that racism is a problem in police forces

08/01/2009
'No evidence' that racism is a problem in police forces

By Chuck Canterbury, president of the National Fraternal Order of Police
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Racism is wrong, and our society suffers whenever we fail to confront racial prejudice in our personal and professional lives. It is wrong to think a man a criminal because of the color of his skin, and it is wrong to think a man a racist because of the color of his uniform. The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the ensuing events are examples of the latter. Assumptions were made that the facts did not bear out, and it turned into every police officer's nightmare. There is a mistaken perception that the ugliness of racism is an intrinsic part of the culture of law enforcement -- a perception we must correct. Racial profiling is not a legitimate law enforcement tool, and there is no evidence that prejudice is a systemic problem in U.S. law enforcement.

Policing is one of the most closely supervised professions in the USA. In fact, Bill Lann Lee, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration, told executives of the Fraternal Order of Police that he found, in more than 90% of the civil rights investigations of police agencies by the Justice Department, it was police managers, not line officers, who were responsible for the agencies' deficiencies.

Racial profiling cannot exist unless police executives allow it -- unless a whole department tolerates it -- and that just does not happen today. Unfortunately, because of past injustices, minority group members sometimes assume that any routine stop of a minority is racial profiling, an assumption that a white driver in the same circumstances is unlikely to make. A decade ago, Congress wisely rejected legislation that would have required officers to record the race of anyone they stopped. Having fought for generations trying to create a color-blind society, should we now embrace the illogical conclusion that the only way toward a color-blind society is to record everyone's color any time we interact?

I do not know how we as a nation solve the problems of racism, but I do know what will and will not work in the profession of law enforcement. We must begin by challenging and refuting the idea that racism is tolerated in our nation's police forces.

Chuck Canterbury is the president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's oldest and largest law enforcement labor organization, representing more than 327,000 members.