Counting Noses
How the campaign against profiling leads to higher crime.

Mr. Dunphy* is an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
December 21, 2001 8:55 a.m.

ll 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 .)