A woman holds a sign during the Silent March to End Stop and Frisk and Racial Profiling in NYC in 2012.

If you weren’t aware, racial profiling is bad. Even if you’re not a gun- and baton-toting boy in blue, to assume something about a person merely based off the color of their skin is bad. These ought to be uncontroversial things.

Cindy Chang of the Los Angeles Times, however, seems to think reality is a bit more complicated. This week, Chang wrote a piece on the difficulties that LAPD’s Metro Division cops have been having with trying to balance out their propensity to racially profile people with their (purported) commitment to mete out justice fairly and equitably.

When “on the ground with Metro in South L.A.,” Chang says, “the realities are more complex than statistics can capture, with decisions about which drivers to stop shaped by years of experience with possible crime indicators, from the man walking up to a parked car” to … having paper license plates.

It’s quite obvious that, taken literally, these “crime indicators” turn anyone who either wants to talk to someone sitting in a parked car, or still has paper plates from the dealership, into a potential target for police harassment.

The LAPD officers quoted in the article provided warmed-over, threadbare arguments to defend their use of racial profiling, so, to put to bed the belief that racial profiling is a useful and effective method for suppressing crime, it’s worth examining and dismantling their arguments at length.

Chief Dennis Kato reasoned that “Metro stops a large number of black drivers because many violent crime suspects are black.” There’s a lot to unpack in those 15 words. First, Kato claims that many violent crime suspects are black. (I’m going to assume, for the sake of argument, that Kato is right. But I’m also allowing him to tell a full-throated lie, because according to the LAPD’s own statistics, less than half of all violent crime suspects in 2018 were black.)

Okay, so what? Many serial killer suspects happen to be white men. Many immigration violations happen to be committed by Latinx people. By admitting this, we haven’t proved anything except that, in certain cases, particular people are overrepresented in particular crime statistics. This says nothing, though, about whether the police ought to stop and investigate people of a certain race for no other reason than their being that race. The argument that police officers are somehow justified in pulling over more black people than white people because black people are more frequently suspects in violent crimes is utter sophistry.

Captain Jonathan Tippet, the head of Metro Division, said that because “black gangs are ‘deeply embedded’” in South LA, and “the victims and suspects are male blacks [of] a certain age group … if I see Grandma running a stop sign, do I really want to focus on her?” The answer, Officer Tippett, is a categorical “yes!” If you are actively looking for a black person to pull over, and in the process witness Grandma running a stop sign, you better go and get Grandma! Running a stop sign can be terribly dangerous, and there’s much more to be had in promoting public safety by pulling over a reckless driver, rather than a person whose only crime is having paper license plates.

And a search for black gang members certainly shouldn’t mean empowering police to dragnet South LA for every black male under the age of 30, and, at the expense of public safety, disregard potentially lethal traffic violations.

With a bit of some lingustic prestidigitation, Sergeant Steve Hwang flatly denied any suggestion that officers racially profile suspects. “I know that not to be the case,” he says. Hwang then went on to explain how the only suspect descriptions he hears on the police radio are of black men, and points out that you don’t really see “that many Asians hanging out on a corner doing crime.” But those who favor getting rid of racing profiling aren’t upset that the police use race to identify suspects, because suspects are people who have been apprehended after the fact. The reason people oppose racial profiling is because it — unlike identifying a suspect by race — rests on the assumption that certain races are more likely to “do crime.”

Hwang’s comments, of course, imply that he refuses to profile Asian people because, unlike black people, they are uninclined to hang out on street corners and “do crime.” And to say that none of the suspect descriptions on the radio are ever of white males is plain-and-simple racism.

We ought to bear in mind the LAPD’s reasoning for its engaging in racial profiling. In Officer Tippett’s telling: “If we’re not here to keep the peace, we’re going to have bloodshed.” Thus the best way to prevent bloodshed is … by disproportionately abusing black people? It’s important to note that nowhere in Chang’s piece do LAPD officers ever provide proof that their discriminatory style of policing has been effective; the least one can do if one is going to defend racial profiling is to trot out some statistics showing how it consistently and measurably reduces violence.

What’s truly astonishing is how LAPD officers openly admit that they racially profile black people, and are unable to provide any justification or proof of its effectiveness, save for some hackneyed Fox News drivel about the inner-city scourge of “black gangs.” Which all only goes to show how criminally sadistic our policing system is.

And yet, even if LAPD’s Metro Division officers did happen to obtain measurable reductions in shootings, robberies, etc., it still wouldn’t justify racial profiling. That’s because racial profiling is in and of itself a gross violation of one’s integrity and right not to be aggressively propped up against a wall and violently groped.

Asking whether racial profiling works to help prevent crime is a separate question from whether the police ought to use it as a tactic; as I say, even if it is effective, this does not by itself make racial profiling morally permissible. Moreover, we know that when the police racially profile suspects, they disproportionately target racial minorities, specifically African Americans.

The LAPD is a prime example of this, considering they have on many occasions demonstrated themselves as being unable to treat people of different races fairly. In Los Angeles, a city that is 9 percent black, almost 50 percent of drivers pulled over in 2018 by the Metro LAPD were black. In South LA, which has a significant black population, black residents were stopped at twice their proportion of the population. Whites, on the other hand, accounted for less than 4 percent of all drivers who were stopped in 2018 in LA, and they compose a third of the city.

Needless to say, the LAPD has refused to listen to black residents’ demands for the police to stop abusing them and get out of their neighborhoods. So too have they ignored legitimate criticisms from civil rights organizations like the ACLU of Southern California, whose director of police practices, Peter Bibring, says that “what [the police] can’t do is assume that because some people are black in the neighborhood have committed crimes, that everybody should be stopped … That is textbook racial profiling.”

But despite having claimed that he “hear[s] and feel[s] the trauma” of South LA’s black communities, Chief Michel Moore has refused to agree to any of their demands. It looks as though South LA’s black residents will continue to be racially profiled, and harassed, and beaten accordingly, while the LAPD’s Metro Division will go on mindlessly spinning its wheels, ignorant to what is the manifestly obvious solution: Leave South LA alone.