Reverse
Racial
Profiling?
New
Orleans
White
Woman
Says
So
on
Appeal
8/3/01
"Hey, white boy, whatcha doin' uptown?" asked knowing onlookers in the Velvet Underground's ode to scoring in Harlem, "Waiting for My Man." New Orleans police have been equally suspicious of white people in majority black neighborhoods, and now they stand accused of practicing reverse racial profiling. Karen Vingle was white and driving a new Mustang through New Orleans' predominantly black Pigeon Town area when she was pulled over -- for being white and driving a new Mustang in the neighborhood, her lawyer told the Associated Press this week. After police detained Vingle on September 23, 1999, they spotted a syringe and a spoon in her purse as she looked for her drivers' license. She was arrested and eventually pled guilty to attempted possession of heroin, possession of cocaine, and possession of diazepam. Vingle, 39, was sentenced to two years in prison and served two months before being released on an appeal bond. During preliminary proceedings in the case, defense attorney Bernard Bagert, Jr. argued that Vingles' constitutional rights were violated because police approached her for being a white woman in "the wrong place." Criminal District Judge Leon Cannizzaro disagreed, ruling the arrest proper, but, as part of a plea agreement, allowed Vingle to appeal his ruling despite her guilty plea. "If we're going to apply the Constitution equally to all races, anybody who is targeted because of their race has been violated," Bagert told the AP. Police testified during the trial that they had arrested "several" white men and women cruising the neighborhood. Black author and columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson must be wondering if this is a case of life imitating art. In an essay in his Hutchinson Report this week attacking racial profiling, he suggested that if police really wanted to crack down on drug abusers, they should target whites. "As absurd as it sounds, a fictional case can be made for cracking down on young whites traveling on our highways, and streets, based on a standard drug user profile," Hutchinson wrote. "While racial profiling proves worthless in preventing black crime, oddly, it could have some racially-reverse value for police as a tool in the deeply flawed, racially-warped drug war. The profile of a typical drug user is not a poor black, or Latino, but a middle-income white, aged 12-25. They make up more than 75 to 80 percent of the drug users in America," Hutchinson noted. "Yet, the lopsided drug use by young whites ignites no outcry for mass arrests, prosecutions, and tough prison sentences for them. It would be political suicide for any public official to dare suggest that police profile white drug users as a tactic to win the drug war." Hutchinson evidently was not referring to white drug users like Vingle, who in frequenting black communities where police are waging the drug war have lost their skin privilege. They have in effect become honorary minorities, although the terms used on the street to describe this phenomenon are rarely so non-derogatory. Hutchinson pointed out that "numerous studies have shown that police officials saturate poor black neighborhoods with small armies of cops. This insures that more blacks will be stopped, searched, and arrested than whites, and further bumps up the arrest totals for blacks." Still, he stops short of actually calling for an escalation of the drug war against white people, but instead levels criticisms at the drug war. Targeting white drug users would "criminalize a generation of young whites, further obliterate civil liberties protections, and create grotesque racial stereotypes about crime and criminals. In other words, it would do the exact same thing that racial profiling has done to a generation of young blacks." In certain New Orleans neighborhoods -- and similar neighborhoods in big cities across the country, if junkie folklore is to be believed -- this is already happening. Racial profiling in the drug war can be an equal opportunity police tactic. Now the Louisiana appeals courts will have the opportunity to decide whether they consider it a legitimate tactic. (Visit http://www.thehutchinsonreport.com/feature.html to read Hutchinson's column online.)
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