By Kevin JOhnson
USA Today
The furor over the arrest of black Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates was just beginning to emerge last week when the Los Angeles Police Department quietly marked the end of a racially charged era of its own.
A federal judge released the police department last week from a near-decade-long agreement with the Justice Department that in part enforced a ban on racial profiling and revamped police training following a corruption investigation that rocked the department.
Since 1994, accusations of racial profiling, racially tinged incidents of excessive force and discriminatory hiring have led the Justice Department to intervene in the operations of eight police agencies in California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Yet those are only a sample, police officials and criminal justice analysts say, of the everyday struggle to overcome a legacy of mistrust that has plagued law enforcement’s dealings with minority communities.
“It’s true that we have learned a lot about how to deal with this issue over the years,” Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton says. “But you don’t have to pick at the scab too long to open the wound.”
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank that has counseled numerous agencies in their interactions with minorities, says many departments for too long refused to confront strained relationships with African-American, Latino and other minority groups. “Departments were in denial, and then there was this epiphany,” Wexler says.
That turning point, Wexler says, came a decade ago when four white New York Police Department officers fatally shot African immigrant Amadou Diallo.
Officers fired 41 times at Diallo, who police mistakenly believed was reaching for a gun. It was later determined that Diallo was not armed but may have been reaching for his wallet.
The shooting sparked widespread protests against the police. The four officers subsequently were charged in the shooting but later acquitted.
“That incident forced departments to take a hard look at what they were doing,” Wexler says. “They had to recognize that race matters.”
For example, shortly after that incident, Wexler says, the Chicago Police Department hosted about 40 community meetings citywide in an attempt to confront the issue there.
“The meetings started with discussions about race,” he says, recalling the sessions. “They ended up in discussions about basic issues like how you communicate and treat people in a respectful manner. ... This issue of race is never going to go away.”
Despite efforts to heal past wounds, David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the book Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work, says incidents such as the Gates case are reminders that law enforcement’s efforts at race relations remain a work in progress.
Last week, Cambridge police dropped disorderly conduct charges against Gates, one of the country’s foremost scholars on African-American culture, after a tense, racially charged exchange between the professor and white Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley.
Because many white Americans have never had such an experience with police, Harris says, many believe cases of racial profiling are overblown or that victims are playing the race card.
“They (whites) find it easy to dismiss those things as if in some way or somehow, the person deserved it,” Harris says.
Bratton, who served as police commissioner in New York and Boston, was hired in Los Angeles after a corruption scandal there enveloped an elite anti-gang unit. Allegations of excessive force and racial profiling sparked a Justice Department intervention in 2001, which forced widespread overhauls.
Among them: installing cameras and microphones in all of the department’s patrol cars. Bratton says the program, expected to cost up to $40 million, should be a valuable source of information and evidence in disputes between officers and citizens.
“This will be one of the strongest tools we have,” Bratton says. “We’ve come a long way in trying to deal with this (race) issue. The good news is that we’re getting better. But we’re also dealing with a very long legacy.”
Copyright 2009 USA TOday