Prudence or profiling? I have my suspicions

I felt like my heart was about to explode.

“How much longer?” I asked the Arizona state trooper, trying desperately to keep my growing rage under control as my wife and I stood behind our car while the officer painstakingly searched it.

My wife, bless her heart, worriedly shook her head at me, believing, as I did, that if I said what was on my mind I’d be in handcuffs.

“Ten minutes,” the gloved trooper said, pawing through luggage carefully packed for our New Mexico vacation.

Watching the trooper work was a young man who was riding with him to see if he liked police work.

It was mid-June, about 100 degrees, and we were stopped on Interstate 40 for going three miles an hour over the speed limit. (I didn’t think it wise to note that from where he had parked he had to see other drivers also pass the slow car, and at much faster speeds.)

Anyway, when he said I was receiving a warning, I thought my problem was over. But then he asked if he could search my car. Why? Because there was a problem with drug trafficking in the area, he said.

Right then I was sure I knew the real reason he stopped my car: salt and pepper racial profiling. The smirk couldn’t be missed on the tall, muscular, white trooper’s face as he looked at me, a bald, white-bearded white guy, and my wife, who happens to be black. He seemed stunned when I said she was my wife, a schoolteacher, and we were going to vacation in Albuquerque. “Uh-huh, right,” he said. He couldn’t seem to get his head around the fact we’d be together for anything positive.

He grinned when I said we don’t do or sell drugs.

One study after another shows that African-American motorists have long been the primary target of law enforcement when it comes to searches for drugs, though research shows whites use drugs far more. A Maryland study showed that 70 percent of those stopped and searched on Interstate 95 were blacks, even though they made up only 17 percent of drivers on the road. An ABC documentary in the ’90s, “Driving While Black,” showed the outrageous behavior.

Once, when my wife got lost in a white area in Michigan, she was pulled over by two cops for going one mile over the speed limit. They approached both sides of the car with guns drawn. “I kept begging, ‘Please put your guns away. You might accidentally shoot my baby (Cameo was in the carseat in back).’ ” After searching her car, officers let her go and told her to stay on the main roads.

That my wife was afraid to drive for months and suffered stomach and anxiety problems requiring medication wasn’t surprising. In a 2008 study of racial profiling, author Whitney Rivera found many blacks consider themselves “hunted by police officers” and noted psychologists “exploring the impact of racial profiling have concluded that it can lead to serious emotional anguish ... and ... severely affects the physical and emotional health of African-Americans.”

What I knew from studies and experience didn’t help us as I reluctantly signed a form giving the officer permission to search. I knew if I didn’t, we’d likely be there for hours, with the officer calling in drug sniffing dogs because of “heightened suspicion.”

(An Arizona lawyer I contacted later, Julio Laboy, confirmed that if time is a concern, it’s best not to fight a search.)

As George Zimmerman was tried for murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, I frequently thought about what happened to me and my wife in Arizona. Many argue Zimmerman racially profiled Martin before the black 17-year-old was shot and killed. Regardless of the verdict, it is clear from presented evidence that only Zimmerman knows for sure.

It is precisely that kind of situation — no objective witnesses to the behavior — that presents the most vexing challenge to overcoming racial profiling by police. You can’t do an ABC documentary everywhere, every day, to prove it’s happening.

Thirty minutes after the search of my car began, and while angrily praying this officer wasn’t the drug planting sort I read about while working on my master’s in criminal justice, it ended.

“Finished,” the trooper said, shaking my hand. “Have a great vacation.”

Not long afterward, I called Laboy after seeing an Internet ad of his stressing you should know your rights if you’re stopped by Arizona state troopers who want to search your car.

“Those searches happen a lot in this state to all kinds of people,” he said.

So it might not have been racial profiling?

“You just don’t know,” Laboy said.

Contact reporter Paul Harasim at
pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.