Pubdate: Thu, 22 April 1999 Source: Star-Ledger (NJ) Copyright: 1999 Star-Ledger Contact: 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J., 07102-1200 Website: http://www.nj.com/starledger/ Forum: http://forums.nj.com/ Author: Jon Shure, in the "Speaking up Column" DON'T TARGET THE INNOCENT IN THE WAR ON DRUGS War, we’re told, calls for serious measures. Rights are secondary. So, in an extreme version of "profiling," Japanese-Americans during World War 11 were deemed more likely than the rest of the populace to engage in subversive activities and thus were kicked out of their homes and placed in detention camps. Today we as a society have said we want our government to fight a war on drugs. Part of this war, it seems, includes stopping innocent people the police say fit the profile of drug dealers, in hopes of getting a closer look at them and observing some behavior that would present a reason to search their vehicles. The rationale is that some crimes are statistically more likely to be committed by members of one ethnic or racial group than another. In other words, you go hunting where the ducks are. Or do you? It's time to ask ourselves some questions, like: Are we so intent on preventing drug trafficking that we'll tolerate people who are not criminals being stopped because of the color of their skin? What's the ratio of innocent people stopped to perpetrators nabbed? Whatever the number turns out to be, is it an aceptable tradeoff? Letters sections of New Jersey newspapers these days are filled with the view that the police are just "doing their job" and that people who are pulled over and then let go should quit bellyaching and support the effort to rid us of drugs. Well, if you accept that view, maybe we should step up the war. Let's put checkpoints at New Jersey's borders and search every car entering or leaving the state. After all, some drug dealers must be white, so why shouldn't whites be stopped as well? Yes, many irate drivers would feel they were being inconvenienced needlessly. But we'd confiscate even more drugs and discourage more drug traders from passing through the state than we do with the hit-and-miss tactic of racial profiling. Of course the public would oppose measures so drastic as stopping all people, even those not observed committing crimes or even violating traffic laws. But anyone who says it's okay to pull over some people who haven't done anything wrong but not all of them is nothing more than a draft dodger in the war on drugs. So let's tell the police they can stop cars only when they see a law being violated. Won't some drug dealers slip through? Yes. But that wouldn't mean we're surrendering in the war on drugs - not unless you think the New Jersey Turnpike is the only possible battleground. Such a strategy would still leave arrests when drugs are sold or used, undercover infiltration of drug gangs, education programs like DARE and a host of other methods, including pulling over drivers on the Turnpike when they really do break the law. We'd be fighting the war in a way consistent with what we say we believe. That's the kind of war people can support. I don't feel safer knowing that in exchange for a certain number of drug runners being arrested on the Turnpike a larger number of innocent citizens must forfeit some of their rights for the supposed greater good, The alienation this practice breeds and the erosion of respect for the law that can only result from profiling carry a higher long-term cost for our society than if a few drug dealers make it up the New Jersey Turnpike. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake