was not open warfare or even vigorous enforcement of the law, but a kind of rivalry or dual power. The police and the Klan became counterbalancing forces rather than outright antagonists. Under such conditions, police may have limited the Klan’s worst atrocities, but they did little to protect Black people from routine abuse and intimidation.24 Likewise, the Klan, while not usually driving the sheriff out of town or making good on their threats against him, limited the scope of his authority and greatly restricted his agenda (especially where the sheriff was a Republican). In Homer, Louisiana, the sheriff gave up policing whole areas of the parish where the Klan was strongest.25 One Texas sheriff found it impossible to raise a posse against Klan activity; White citizens told him derisively to “Call on your nigger friends.”26
But usually, law enforcement agents were unwilling to move against the Klan, even when they were backed by federal military force.27 And they were almost never willing to avail themselves of the one source of power that may have been most readily mobilized against Klan activity—the Black population. Even when faced with widespread lawlessness, White officials proved unwilling to arm and rally their Black constituency.28 It may be that they worried such a move would create a panic among Whites and provoke further violence, or it may be that they feared creating a Black resistance that they could not then control.29 Whatever the reasons, the result was disastrous for African Americans.
As renegade states were reincorporated into the Union and the federal commitment to Reconstruction waned, Black people were returned to something very much like their previous status. When Democrats attained control of state legislatures and local governments, they passed a series of “Black Codes” designed to regulate the former slaves and reconstitute the system of White supremacy—based not on the private institution of slavery, but on publicly established segregation.30 Black people were, whether by law, custom, or Klan intimidation, commonly forbidden to own land, run businesses, work on railroads, change employers, travel, or vote.31 Those convicted of crimes, even nominal offenses such as “vagrancy,”32 could be imprisoned and returned to involuntary servitude, leased to wealthy Whites to work in their fields, factories, or mines.33 This was termed, in the parlance of Southern Whites, “Redemption.” For Black people, it was more like damnation.
Slave Patrols Revisited
During the Reconstruction period, the line between legal and extra-legal authority became extremely hazy. The Klan took on criminal violence in the defense of an archaic view of law and order, and the local authorities were either incapable or unwilling to challenge them. In many cases, the police were actually complicit with Klan violence, and it seemed that the two organizations pursued the same ends, sometimes using the same means. These common features were not arrived at by chance. Both the police and the Klan were adaptations of an earlier and deeply entrenched Southern institution—the slave patrols.34 As Sally Hadden recounts:
In the new regime of Reconstruction, Southern whites were forced to adopt laws and policing methods that appeared racially unbiased, but they relied upon practices derived from slave patrols and their old laws that had traditionally targeted blacks for violence. To resolve this apparent contradiction, the more random and ruthless aspects of slave patrolling passed into the hands of vigilante groups like the Klan.… Meanwhile, policemen in Southern towns continued to carry out those aspects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race-neutral but that in reality were applied selectively. Police saw that nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets, just as patrollers had done in the colonial and antebellum eras.35
The slave patrols helped form the character of both the police and the Klan. Like the slave patrols, the Klan was organized locally, operated mostly at night, drew its members from every class of White society, enforced a pass system and curfew, broke up Black social gatherings and meetings, searched homes, seized weapons, and enforced its demands through violence and intimidation.36 A former slave, J.T. Tims, remarked, “There wasn’t no difference between the patrols and the Ku Klux that I know of. If th’d ketch you, they all would whip you.”37
As a part of this same tradition, racial minorities (especially Black people) became the objects of police control,38 the targets of brutality, and the victims of neglect.39 Perhaps the clearest inheritance from this tradition is the racial characterization of criminality—the criminalizing of people of color, and Black people especially. Presently understood in terms of “profiling,” the practice is much older than the current controversy. Under slavery, “Bondsmen could easily be distinguished by their race and thus became easy and immediate targets of racial brutality.”40 The only thing new about racial profiling is the term, which makes prejudicial harassment seem procedural, technical, even scientific.
Profiles and Prejudice
One critic of racial profiling, David Harris, defines the concept in terms of more general police techniques. He writes:
Racial profiling grew out of a law enforcement tactic called criminal profiling.
Criminal profiling has come into increasing use over the last twenty years, not just as a way to solve particular crimes police know about but also as a way to predict who may be involved in as-yet-undiscovered crimes, especially drug offenses. Criminal profiling is designed to help police spot criminals by developing sets of personal and behavioral characteristics associated with particular offenses. By comparing individuals they observe with profiles, officers should have a better basis for deciding which people to treat as suspects. Officers may see no direct evidence of crime, but they can rely on noncriminal but observable characteristics associated with crime to decide whether someone seems suspicious and therefore deserving of greater police scrutiny.
When these characteristics include race or ethnicity as a factor in predicting crimes, criminal profiling can become racial profiling. Racial profiling is a crime-fighting strategy—a government policy that treats African Americans, Latinos, and members of other minority groups as criminal suspects on the assumption that doing so will increase the odds of catching criminals.41
Harris is right that racial profiling is a subset of criminal profiling, but he has the genealogy reversed. As we saw in previous chapters, long before the police used high-discretion tactics and vice laws to regulate the lives of the immigrant working class, their predecessors in law enforcement were using race as the sole factor directing their activities. Harris overlooks a crucial feature of this history: both the slave patrols and the laws they enforced existed for the express purpose of controlling the Black population. There was no pretense of racial neutrality, and so there was less concern with the abstract aim of controlling “crime” than with the very concrete task of controlling Black people. Black people were, in a sense, criminalized—but more importantly, they were permanently deemed objects for control.
As cities industrialized, White workers formed another troublesome group. Efforts to control these new “dangerous classes” were more legalistic and impartial (in form, if not in application) than those directed against the slaves. Laws against vagrancy, gambling, prostitution, loitering, cursing, and drinking (the nineteenth-century equivalent of our current war on drugs) brought the habits of the poor into the jurisdiction of the police, and the police directed their suspicions accordingly. Thus, contrary to Harris’s account, racial profiling gave birth to the broader category of “criminal profiling”—not the other way around.
What may distinguish our contemporary notion of “profiling” from simple prejudice is the idea that suspicious characteristics can somehow be scientifically identified and formulated into a general type in order to rationally direct police suspicions. It is the war on drugs that has most recently popularized profiling, initially because of the work of Florida Highway Patrol officer, and later Volusia County sheriff, Bob Vogel. Vogel formulated a list of “cumulative similarities” that he used in deciding whether to search a vehicle. These included factors like demeanor, discrepancies in the vehicle’s paperwork, over-cautious driving, the model of the car, and the time of the trip. In the mid-1980s, after Vogel made several particularly impressive arrests, the DEA adopted
