own home. Four cops—Sean Carrol, Edward McMellon, Kenneth Boss, and Richard Murphy—fired a total of forty-one shots. Nineteen hit him. Diallo was unarmed, and had committed no crime.96 He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Black.
Stephen Worth, a lawyer for the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, explained the shooting: “He is acting strange, he fits the rapist’s description in a generic way.… The reason they are shooting him is they think he has a gun.”97 Worth refused to elaborate on Diallo’s “strange” behavior, the “description” he matched, or why the police would think he was armed. But witnesses later helped to fit the shooting into a broader pattern; they told the Village Voice that earlier in the evening the same officers—members of the elite Street Crimes Unit—were stopping and searching numerous Black men, seemingly at random. Such behavior fit the unit’s established modus operandi. In 1997 and 1998 the Street Crimes Unit stopped and searched 45,000 men, mostly Blacks and Latinos; it made 9,000 arrests.98
Amadou Diallo was not a criminal. He was not, in any real sense, a suspect. He matched a “generic” description. He fit the profile. He was a young Black man, and that was enough. He became, quite literally, a target. The police gunned him down as he stood in his doorway. They fired forty-one shots.
Diallo’s shooting represents only one cost of racial profiling—the losses calculated in terms of bodies, bullet holes, scars, and stitches. But there are other victims, other costs, counted in years, marked off in cell blocks, ringed with razor wire.99 Race-based policing contributes to the overrepresentation of minorities (especially Black people) at every stage of the criminal legal process. Statistics from mid-sized cities across the country show startling disparities in the drug arrest rates for Whites and Blacks.
If we look specifically at the rates for drug sales (excluding marijuana), the gap is even more striking:
Arrest leads to court, and court leads to prison, and the disparities continue at each step.102 According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at the end of 2010 there were 2,226,832 people in jail or prison in the United States, another 4,887,900 on probation or parole—for a total of 7.1 million in some way under the supervision of the correctional authorities. That means that 3 percent of adults were under correctional supervision, including 1 in 48 on probation or parole and 1 in 104 in jail or prison. Put differently: almost 1 percent of the adult population is behind bars (962 per 100,000).103 Of those, in 2010, Blacks were 13 percent of the national population but 40 percent of the prison population; Hispanics were 16 percent of the U.S. population and 19 percent in prison; and Whites were 64 percent nationally, but only 39 percent carcerally.104 For every 100,000 Black women in the U.S., 260 were in prison; for every 100,000 Latina women, 133; for White women, 91. More startling still, for every 100,000 Black men, 4,347 were in prison; for Latino men, 1,775; for White men, 678.105 Doing the math, we see that Black women are almost three times as likely to go to prison as White women (2.8): Latina women are almost half again as likely (1.45). Black men are 6.4 times as likely to be imprisoned as White men, and Hispanic men nearly three times as likely (2.6). By some estimates, one in every three Black men will go to jail at some point in his life.106
Taken together, the numbers on police stops, searches, arrests, and incarceration, show a persistent bias in the criminal legal system, one neither explained nor justified by any considerations related to crime. The evidence absolutely contradicts the idea that racial profiling is useful in getting drugs, or guns, or criminals, off the streets. If we insist on viewing the police as crime-fighters, profiling can only be seen as a mistake, a persistent disaster. But if we suspend or surrender this noble view of police work, and look instead at the actual consequences of what the cops do, profiling does make a certain kind of sense; it follows a sinister logic. Racial profiling is not about crime at all; it’s about controlling people of color.
Racial profiling doesn’t only label certain groups as the objects of official control, it also limits the mobility of people of color, and thus restricts their access to resources and opportunities. Harris notes:
It may cause many people of color to plan their driving and travel routes in certain ways, to take (or not take) particular jobs.… They may simply stay out of places and neighborhoods where they will “stand out”—where police may feel they don’t “belong”.… [And thus,] these tactics help to reinforce existing segregation in housing and employment.107
Race-based policing, and especially the fear of Black criminality, has a more subtle function as well—maintaining the ideological basis of White unity and indirectly controlling the political allegiances of White people. While people of color are the targets of racial profiling, there are actually two audiences. Profiling serves to humiliate and threaten those who are targeted; even when it does not lead to criminal sanctioning, it serves as a not-very-subtle reminder of their “place.” And it helps to align White people with the power structure by convincing them that the state protects them from purportedly criminal people of color.108
In all these respects, police and prisons have replaced patrols and plantations as the means by which White society maintains its dominance over Black people.109
Racial Lines, National Borders
Of course the racial politics of policing are not simply Black and White. Over the last two decades immigration, like crime, has increasingly served as a coded proxy for race, a way of talking about it without saying it. Immigration enforcement, then, has operated as an ostensibly color-blind means of maintaining White supremacy, which has directed police attention toward those groups with a sizeable proportion of immigrants—the Latino community most of all.110
Until the mid-1990s immigration was treated as a strictly federal matter. Aside from notifying the Immigration and Naturalization Service when taking foreign nationals into custody, local and state police had little role to play in enforcement. In the last two decades, and especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, local cops have increasingly been enlisted—sometimes eagerly, sometimes over their objections—to enforce immigration law.111 The new police duties came as a result of several major shifts occurring simultaneously, or in quick succession. Border enforcement has been increasingly militarized, incorporating the use of helicopters and drones, and sometimes involving marines and Army Special Forces.112 At the same time many immigration violations, which had previously been treated as administrative or civil matters, have now been criminalized; and the remaining administrative elements have become increasingly punitive.113 Enforcement has also come to focus more and more on the interior of the country, in cities and farm towns far from the border.114
The implications for civil liberties have been serious, and bad: Because immigration has historically been an administrative and civil (rather than criminal) matter, it has weaker safeguards and suspects enjoy fewer rights. For example, the courts have been more flexible in search and seizure requirements and often allow illegally obtained evidence to be presented in deportation hearings; Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has thus been aggressive in testing the limits of the Fourth Amendment, a habit that police will likely carry with them into criminal investigations as well. Police may also take advantage of the lower standards and decide to treat immigration enforcement as a cover for criminal investigations, using ICE databases, civil warrants, and immigration holds for other purposes.115
Police involvement began in earnest in 2002, when Florida entered into an agreement with the federal authorities under which local cops would be trained and deputized as immigration officers. Such arrangements had been authorized by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, but the provision, section 287(g), had never been used before. Soon others followed suit—Alabama in 2003, six more jurisdictions over the
