What of Racial Profiling and its Application to Illegal Immigration? Part 1

Posted by Guest Writer on June 15, 2010 under How | Read the First Comment

By Norton R Nowlin

The two thought-provoking words, racial and profiling, may be used together to convey a very sinister tone, especially to someone who has no real idea what racial profiling comprises and how it is used daily in law enforcement as a valid means of apprehending criminal suspects. The old, “let me see your papers, you don’t look Aryan,” anecdotal scenario, as applied to the fascist-Nazi motif, when the trench-coated Gestapo agent grabs the unwitting bearded suspect by the collar and carts him off to a dungeon where the person is tortured for information, is not the correct application of racial profiling in American law enforcement. Instead, imagine an elderly woman mugged on a street corner in downtown San Diego, California during the late afternoon. A police officer arrives on the scene after the mugger flees with the woman’s purse, and asks the bruised and bleeding woman a series of very important questions.

“Who mugged you, ma’am?

“A man,” she replies.”

“Would you describe the man?”

“He was a big man,” she says.

The police officer now asks the question that will really define the search for the mugger and create a racial profile needed in apprehending the mugger.

“Was the man white, black, Hispanic, Oriental, or Middle-Eastern?”

She replies, “Oh, he was a big tall black man, probably in his late forties, with half of an ear missing. He also had a thick black beard, a mustache, and a hand-gun.”

Now, grant you, most victims of muggings are not as descriptively glib and as emotionally responsive as this particular example of an elderly woman, beaten and robbed, conveys, but let’s assume that it happens as stated. The police officer writes his report and gets on his radio and puts out a call for all officers in that particular vicinity of San Diego to be on the lookout for an armed, bearded, mustached black man in his late forties, with half-an-ear missing. So, who, then, will the responding police officers be considering as suspects, white men, Hispanic men, Middle-Eastern men, or Orientals? None of these will be considered as suspects. Law enforcement will only be looking for black men according to the victim’s description. A black man has been racially profiled in a basic fashion in this fundamental example of how police (local, county, state, and federal) approach the apprehension of any, and all, suspects.

In a racially and ethnically diverse nation, as is the United States, racial profiling is ultimately necessary in the practice of law enforcement when attempting to apprehend and arrest criminal perpetrators, who are members of particular racial or ethnic classes. Determination of skin color is actually only the beginning in the process of profiling. The suspect’s age, height, color of hair, eye color, build, distinguishing marks, ethnically or racially distinguishing behaviors, characteristic clothing, and, even, type of shoes are descriptive factors in addition to skin color, and are merely the physical profiling details delineating parts of a composite profile of a perpetrator. The psychological and behavioral attributes of the perpetrators, when known, must be added to the physical details in order to complete the composite profile. Ultimately, not knowing the race, or skin color, of the perpetrator would yield an incomplete profile and make a successful apprehension of the suspect almost impossible.

In Ireland, for instance, where less than 8 percent of the population is black, racial profiling would be even more delineated, and pronounced, by law enforcement, if the suspect were described as a large black male with half an ear missing. Since there are so few black people in Ireland, and many more people of Middle-Eastern origin, racial profiling there hardly result in indignant cries of racial discrimination from the black community. In most cases, the greater the concentration of a minority population, the greater the chances of indiscriminate and unfair accusations of racial discrimination by that minority when law enforcement uses all available tools. Yet, the process of racial profiling remains ultimately necessary.

Now let’s proceed to the issue of enforcement of immigration laws and apply the factors necessary in profiling in order to derive a determination of “who reasonably fits the description of a Hispanic illegal alien.” First and, foremost, illegal immigration is a federal, and state, crime, as much as shoplifting is a crime, and Hispanic men, women, and adolescent children who violate the law should be apprehended and arrested. Those U.S. citizens who don’t agree with this basic premise are, in effect, advocating anarchy, and comprise a dangerous human microcosm of whim and arbitrariness within a nation of laws. Police officers who attempt to determine who, out of a population of millions of Hispanics, could reasonably be considered an illegal alien suspect, fully realize that a brown skin, or a dark complexion, is, but, one of the characteristics belonging to an Hispanic illegal alien.

So, if, perchance, a person with a brown complexion, and the other innate facial characteristics belonging to a Hispanic racial model, is speeding in a car down an Arizona highway, a police officer knows that that particular individual “might” be an illegal alien, just like the officer realizes that the individual might be a car thief, or an inebriated driver. The racial profiling by law enforcement has, therefore, already begun. When the officer stops the car and approaches it from the rear, he might notice bumper stickers on the automobile advertising a local college or a major university, or parking permits at a hospital or another professional setting. As he will near the driver, after stopping the car, the officer will probably ask him, or her, for a driver’s license, car registration, and proof of insurance. If the diver is Hispanic and replies in fluent English, “Sure officer, here they are,” and hands them through the window to the policeman, the peace officer might continue the conversation by asking if the driver is a student at the college or university displayed on the car. If the driver has nothing to hide, he, or she, will usually respond, either, yes or no in a friendly fashion to the question, which will show that the suspect is almost certainly an American citizen of Hispanic extraction. After perusing the driver’s license, proof of insurance, and registration, the officer will go back to the police car and call the suspects name and license number into the National Crime Identification Center database, where a search for outstanding warrants will be made. Then the officer will call the car’s tag number into another database for identification to see if it might be stolen. If everything checks out to be proper, the officer will return the driver’s documents, with the speeding citation, to him, or her, and finally explain to the driver the appearance that he, or she, has to make at court if the citation is challenged, or the proper way to pay the imposed fine for speeding. This is what ordinarily happens during most traffic stops.

Now, let’s look at the scenario a bit differently. During the traffic stop, the police officer notices, from a distance, that the driver is a Hispanic male, probably in his late 20s. As he walks toward the car, a late model BMW, he sees a bumper sticker saying, Arizona State University Alumnus. Then he approaches the driver and says, “Good evening,” but the driver only smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He also notices that the driver is dressed in dirty kakis and is perspiring heavily. There is also a strong smell of beer, or some other type of alcoholic beverage, coming from the car. He then asks for the driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance, to which the Hispanic driver only shrugs, grins, and says “No hable.” Then the officer, with his hand on his unsnapped weapon, reaches slowly into the car, through the driver’s window, and takes the keys from the car’s ignition. He then firmly tells the driver, using hand gestures, to stay in the car, to which the driver, again, only grins and shrugs. The officer then proceeds to call in the car’s tag number to discover that the automobile, owned by a teacher, was stolen a day earlier from a parking lot in downtown Phoenix. According to police protocol, the officer calls for backup, that is, another police unit to assist him in what has now become a felony stop. The Hispanic suspect is subsequently arrested for two felonies (car theft and a loaded handgun found in the car’s glove compartment during a search of the vehicle), and four misdemeanors (speeding, driving without a license, driving under the influence of alcohol, and having open containers of alcohol in an automobile) and it is, finally, determined that the Hispanic suspect is an illegal alien with no documentation on his person. Has racial profiling occurred in this scenario? No, it hasn’t. So, let’s change things a bit.

Suppose a call has gone out for all Arizona peace officers to be looking for a late model Mercedes, owned by an Arizona State University professor, which was stolen from a downtown Phoenix parking lot a few hours earlier. A reliable witness, a Hispanic waitress at a restaurant across from the parking lot, said that, on a break, she saw a short Hispanic male, late 20s, in dirty kakis, break into the particular car in the parking lot and drive away at a fast speed. On exiting the parking lot, the car and driver passed so closely by the witness that she was able to see a prominent tattoo on the left side of the man’s face. So, the call goes out for such a suspect. Has racial profiling occurred? Yes. A detailed physical description of the Hispanic perpetrator was provided for law enforcement by a reliable witness. Such a description is the only means of searching for the thief in a large population of Hispanic males. Will the police be looking for white, black, or Oriental males? No, they won’t. It will be confined to only a population of Hispanic men between the ages of 20 and 30, dressed in dirty kakis, with tattoos on the left side of their faces. How many Hispanic aliens in Arizona, illegal or not, might fit this description, hundreds, thousands?

If the perpetrator depicted above is eventually apprehended and arrested, there is a very high probability that he will turn out to be an illegal alien, which will add another misdemeanor, a state and federal misdemeanor, to the charges against him. But does the mere unfolding of routine events in law enforcement make the typical Arizona policeman racist? Do they hate the perpetrator because he has the brown skin of a person of Hispanic origin? No, they don’t. Every Arizona peace office has taken an oath to uphold, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of the State of Arizona, and to faithfully enforce all criminal and civil laws legislated by the State of Arizona. This simply means that discovering that a Hispanic suspect is an illegal alien during an investigation and/or arrest for the commission of another crime is merely the correct enforcement of the law. Yet, there is much more to correct and prudent law enforcement to consider than meets the eye.

Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the University of Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, was a sworn San Diego County, California, Deputy Sheriff, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin has attended LaJolla, California’s National University and Malibu’s Pepperdine University to attain graduate credits in business management and economics. Mr. Nowlin also attained a Texas State Teaching Certification, in social studies and psychology, from the University of Texas at Tyler. A paralegal, published essayist, poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.