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but lost in the hunt for foreign-born terrorists since September
11 has been the unpleasant fact that we still have plenty of the
homegrown variety walking among the streets among us. According
to the FBI, there were 15,517 criminal homicides, 90,186 forcible
rapes, and 407,842 robberies in the United States in the year 2000.
Occurring as they did in isolated incidents spread out over the
entire country, the great majority of these crimes received little
or no news coverage, especially here in Los Angeles where only a
celebrity angle can move a crime story off the back pages of the
Los Angeles Times.
Though the
FBI compiles these statistics, it has little to do with the apprehension
of those responsible for these and the other, less serious crimes
that impact the country. That task remains with the local cop on
the street. Unfortunately, there are those who would let the inflamed
passions of the professionally and perennially aggrieved stand in
the way of effective law enforcement. I refer of course to the hysteria
over "racial profiling," the predictable effect of which
has been a reluctance among police officers to take preemptive action
against criminals in the areas most plagued by them.
Under the terms
of a federal consent decree, we in the LAPD have been collecting,
since November 1, demographic data on nearly every person we contact
in the course of our workday. Each officer is required to turn in
a "data capture report" on every person with whom he initiates
an encounter, whether that encounter leads to an arrest, a citation,
a verbal warning, or what have you. The forms are completed by filling
in little circles on the page, similar to marking answers on a multiple-choice
exam. If we don't know the exact ethnicity or age of the person,
we're instructed to guess. No one has told us what will be done
with this information or who might have access to it when it is
compiled, but we cops, tending as we do towards cynicism, fear the
worst. If I show a pattern of filling in too many of the wrong circles
there may be dire consequences awaiting me, no matter how benign
my contacts may have been.
Those who insist
on this sort of data collection are numb to the nettlesome fact
that is in areas heavily populated by certain minorities that crime
is most rampant. The residents of these areas are the ones most
in need of proactive police officers for security against those
who would prey on them. Instead, the opposite is happening. I recently
came across some interesting information from one of the LAPD's
18 patrol divisions. On paper, the area is a picture of ethnic diversity:
Whites form the largest racial group, though they are less than
a third of the overall population. There are significant numbers
of Hispanics, blacks, and Asians, as well as a large number of what
LAPD record keepers label as "others." But while the population
is diverse, the crime statistics are not. In a recent one-month
period there were over a hundred robberies, all but a handful of
which were committed by Hispanics and blacks, and the majority of
which were committed against Hispanics and blacks. Prudence
would seem to dictate that if a police officer in this division
were interested in reducing the number of robberies he would focus
his efforts on those areas where they occur and on people matching
the descriptions of reported suspects.
But wait! What
about all those circles to be filled in? Yes, in order to produce
a more demographically diverse pattern of citizen contacts, officers
are spending more time outside of the areas where the robberies
are occurring in order to seek out lawbreakers — usually minor
traffic violators — who will help them bring their little circles
into a more acceptable line. The net result is fewer hurt feelings
but more crime in the areas these officers have abandoned. News
accounts and e-mails from fellow police officers tell me this is
happening all over the country.
The first responsibility
of government is the protection of its citizens. Violent crime in
Los Angeles has increased 16 percent over the past two years, while
arrests for violent crime have decreased 17 percent. Perhaps one
day someone will realize there is a correlation between these numbers
and do something to reverse the trend.
(*Jack
Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are
his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management
.)
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