The Police and Racial Profiling

Jul 24, 2009 Editorial

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is unquestionably the most eminent African-American scholar in the United States today. Named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997 and as the long tenured director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, his work has drawn sustained commendation for his determined and meticulous approach in dealing with the issue of race in general and the issue of Black-White relations in the US in particular.
Back in 1995, in a New Yorker magazine article, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man”, Prof. Gates had touched on the incendiary issue of racial profiling by the US police.
Lamenting the profound distrust between African-Americans and the police, he pointed out ruefully, “Blacks — in particular, black men — swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories and there are few who don’t have more than one story to tell.”
Almost a decade and a half later, with an African-American President in the White House, he unfortunately became involved in another “war story”.
Returning from a long and exhausting trip to China last Thursday, Dr Gates found his front door jammed and worked with his driver to get into his home.
The police, responding to a call from a woman claiming that ‘’two black males’’ were breaking into the house arrested Dr Gates even after he had produced evidence that he was the owner of the house and that he worked at Harvard. Claiming that Dr Gates ‘’exhibited loud and tumultuous behaviour” the police handcuffed him and hauled him over to the police station where he was held for some four hours.
Some of Gates’s African-American colleagues assert that the arrest is part of a pattern of racial profiling in Cambridge and one, Allen Counter, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard for 25 years, claimed bluntly, ‘’We do not believe that this arrest would have happened if Professor Gates was white’’.
Dr Gates’ arrest has re-opened the old debate on racial profiling in the US and has elicited a sharp response from President Obama who had attempted to steer a middle path on the tricky question of “race” in America ever since the issue was contentiously raised during the Democratic primaries.
Said the President, “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that’s just a fact.”
He added later that the incident was “a sign of how race remains a factor in this society.”
In Guyana, the issue of racial profiling by the police has been part and parcel of our history since the very formation of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) in 1839. The white Colonial rulers, after all, defined the African ex-slaves and then the Indian indentureds as the threats the police had to counteract.
Fast-forwarding to the present, there have been persistent complaints that African youths are being targeted by the police whenever certain crimes have been committed – especially in the Georgetown and East Coast Demerara areas.
If at the very highest level of the US administration, there can be an admission that decades of sustained interventions with their police and other organisations in their justice system to eradicate racial profiling still needs tweaking, we in Guyana cannot assume that the problem in our jurisdiction will simply vanish of its own volition.
The issue is very complex and must be dealt with in a sophisticated, multifaceted manner. But we must initiate the process now.

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The Police and Racial Profiling

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