Pioneer Planet

Published: Sunday, August 12, 2001

Cops, stops and race

NICK COLEMAN

Payne Avenue, corner of Jenks, 1:35 a.m. on a drizzly, early Saturday on St. Paul's East Side. Police officer John Linssen has stopped a blue 1987 Chevy that is traveling slowly -- too slowly -- with its bright lights on.

I have been riding with Linssen, playing a ride-along game, trying to guess the driver's race and gender each time Linssen stops an errant motorist. I have been wrong almost every time, sometimes comically. At the first stop, after Linssen has followed a car with a burned-out headlight for six blocks and shined his spotlight on the back of the driver's head, I confidently predict that the driver is a middle-age white woman with gray hair. She turns out to be a 23-year-old African-American whose dark hair reflects the white light so brightly it looks white itself.

Racial profiling -- police stopping motorists disproportionately by race -- is a hot-button issue. So I have decided to go on three ride-alongs with the cops -- including one alongside an African-American officer -- to see what it looks like on the streets. It turns out to be more complicated than I had imagined. Still, as Linssen pulls up behind that Chevy on Payne Avenue and we get out of his squad car to approach the driver, I believe I have this one nailed: Linssen's spot hits the driver from behind, illuminating a broad-rimmed hat like my grandmother wore.

"Old lady," I predict. "White woman. Doesn't even know she has her brights on."

Wrong again. The driver turns out to be a slight, middle-age African-American man giving off a heavy smell of alcohol. His name is Dwight, and he has no driver's license. In fact, he hasn't had one for 10 years. He has just gotten out of the Ramsey County Jail for the 36th time. As Linssen waits for another squad to bring a portable Breathalyzer, Dwight tells me he was beaten by police after a 1996 arrest.

"I was talking s - - - and the officers said they were tired of my mouth, and I said one more word and they beat the s - - - out of me," Dwight recounts matter-of-factly while Linssen listens impassively. "They almost broke my leg. But I brought it on myself. So that's why I left that s - - - alone.

"I'm just a poor black guy. I'm 41 years old and I'm just trying to live, that's all. I had a few drinks tonight -- I stayed (at the bar) because I'm alone. I can't get my license because I can't pay the fines -- the fines is so high I can't afford to pay them. The tickets were just for being stopped for nothing. If I was a white guy, I'd get a better play. I didn't get into no other trouble other than that. I got a perfect record."

Dwight asks repeatedly if he can just go home. He says he was almost home and that he has a driver's permit. Linssen, who has checked Dwight's record on his computer terminal, knows better: "No you don't, Dwight," he says sharply. "You're revoked!"

Dwight's not going home. He blows a 0.19 on the Breathalyzer, meaning he has a blood alcohol content almost twice the limit. Dwight is going to jail a 37th time.

"Oh, man, you ain't showing me no love at all," Dwight moans from the back as Linssen drives to headquarters to book him and have him take an official breath test. "I wasn't driving no f - - - ing drunk, what are you talking about? You're really putting a hurt on me, man, you taking me to jail for a DUI, man. ... God gonna get you, the man upstairs know what you did. I'm not drunk at all. You always treat a nigger like there's still slavery, anyway. If I was a white boy, you'd say, "Go home.'

"Dirty mother - - - - - - ! Dirty mother - - - - - - !"

A TENSE BACKDROP

It hasn't been an easy year to be a St. Paul police officer. Since the racial profiling issue arose last winter, cops who make traffic stops for such infractions as speeding, drunken driving or equipment problems have been under intense scrutiny. In June, Police Chief William Finney reached an agreement with civil rights leaders that was intended to defuse suspicions that some cops stop motorists based on their race.

Historically, minorities have complained that white officers have threatened, beaten and abused people of color. St. Paul has not been notorious for prejudice on the police force. Nevertheless, it's hard to ignore the national debate over police brutality and racial profiling -- it was only this spring that a police shooting of an unarmed black man led to rioting in Cincinnati. If you raise the profiling issue in conversation with African-American men, many will give you horror stories of being stopped, intimidated or worse, simply for being black. And when you're black and are pulled over by white cops, it can be hard sometimes to separate racial appearances from policing realities.

Kellen Burch, a 19-year-old African-American football player at the University of South Dakota, was pulled over near his parents' Summit-University home in St. Paul on the Fourth of July, mistaken by police for a gang member wanted for questioning in a shooting. The scene, as Burch describes it, was scary.

Burch says he and three friends were held at gunpoint, handcuffed, taken to squad cars and interrogated for 30 minutes before being let go. One officer -- Burch says he thinks it was a Ramsey County sheriff's deputy -- threatened to "beat the s - - - out of you, you little black mother - - - - - - ." Burch's mother wants him to file a complaint, but he isn't sure if he will. He doesn't know the names of the officers who stopped him.

The treatment Burch says he received from a deputy is "unacceptable," said a spokesman for the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department, Mark Naylon, who said Burch should file a complaint about the incident if he can identify the deputy. Identifying law enforcement officers always has been iffy, however.

By next month, that may change. Under the terms of Finney's agreement with the NAACP, officers will have to give their business cards to those they stop. They also must advise motorists that they can refuse an officer's request to search them or their vehicle, and how to file a complaint with the department. The agreement has been hailed by community leaders but has not gone over well with many cops. Some say it has branded all cops as racist and that Finney, an African-American, conceded too much.

The frustration isn't buried very deep. Officers I spoke with complained that the racial profiling debate has created a climate in which some drivers object to being stopped at all by police, no matter what the infraction. Lawbreakers, cops contend, have begun to use the issue as "a counter-maneuver" to try to evade a ticket or an arrest.

FIGHTING WORDS

"I

'm tired of being called a racist when I'm not,'' officer Chris Stark tells me during a recent afternoon roll call at the Police Department's East Team headquarters at Payne Avenue and Minnehaha. "I'm just trying to do my job."

Stark, who is white, says he recently stopped an African-American woman who was driving 45 miles per hour in a 30 zone. She was driving without a driver's license. But when Stark asked her to step out of the car, he says, she refused, cursed at him and accused him of stopping her because she was black. He wrote her a ticket and watched her drive away, angry that she had ignored his order but fearful of pushing the issue.

"She was laughing as she drove away," he says. "I tell you, if that had been you" -- meaning me, a white man -- "and you had refused to get out of the car, I'd have yanked you out the window."

I don't doubt it. Sometimes, policing requires the use of force or the threat of force to maintain order. As one cop said, he has a three-point plan in an encounter with a citizen: "First I'm going to ask you, then I'm going to tell you, and then I'm going to make you."

The profiling controversy has made everything more complicated. Instead of that simple three-point plan, officers now find themselves having to deal with sensitive racial questions before they get to the police work. And the cops I met on the East Side -- almost to a man and woman -- don't like it.

"Society expects us to do their dirty work," says officer Tim Bradley, who won the Police Department's Officer of the Year award in the spring. "But then they get mad at us when we do. Now we've got a 6-foot leash put on us by the NAACP. If I (stop) a person of color, I've got to dot all my i's and cross all my t's. It's forcing us to be reactive, rather than proactive. None of us support racial profiling -- it's wrong. We admit that, and we want to be held accountable. But we only want to be held accountable in the right way."

I spent a recent day riding (pedaling, actually) with Bradley and officer Murray Prust as they patrolled the East Side on bicycles. Bradley, a 26-year veteran, is a conscientious officer who talks kindly but gruffly to schoolchildren blocking traffic, blows his police whistle and shouts instructions at motorists to turn their radios down to a decent decibel. He worries that the profiling issue is hampering the work of police officers. Known for his innovative ideas, Bradley (whose father also was a career St. Paul cop) thinks video cameras in every squad car would be a better plan.

"I'd rather have cameras record every arrest than be second-guessed by an organization that knows nothing about law enforcement. And that would be the NAACP," Bradley says. "If we had a tape of every arrest, I think people would see that we do our job based not on color but on behavior."

Nathaniel Khaliq, president of the St. Paul branch of the NAACP, says his organization favors video recording of police stops. But he says that technology alone can't solve the problem and that police must learn to cooperate more with the community, especially communities of color. If cops are complaining that they have to deal with the concerns of minorities and change the way they work, well, Khaliq says, welcome to the world.

"The police don't like us looking over their shoulders? We were already looking over their shoulders," Khaliq says. "I would think they'd embrace a partnership to try to resolve these problems. Communities of color have endured a lot, and there's more than enough evidence in St. Paul to show that people of color -- especially African-Americans -- have been targeted by law enforcement agencies for selective enforcement. We have suffered abuse and mistreatment around the country, and St. Paul is not an exception."

Racial concerns flared last month after the Rondo Days celebration when police dispersed a crowd of African-American young people and an 18-year-old black man was arrested and forcefully subdued by half a dozen cops. Chief Finney has denied accusations that the man was beaten, and troops in the field -- white and black -- echo his conviction that racial bias was not on display. If anything, they say, too much sensitivity to racial concerns helped lead to the trouble. The cops, some say, hung back too long for fear of being labeled insensitive while the situation deteriorated and groups of young people blocked traffic and milled around in the streets.

"We took a lot more than we should have," says officer David Quast, who was at the scene. "If I was a citizen who knew nothing about law enforcement and I was watching the police letting these kids run block to block, pushing people over and knocking them down, I would have been embarrassed for the St. Paul Police Department."

Maybe Quast is right. Society doesn't want police to fight a problem to a standstill. We want them to prevail.

"We're trained not just to defuse the situation," says Officer Bradley. "They teach us at the police academy that the city has to win. We have to win. Losing is not acceptable."

In essence, cops say, the 18-year-old arrested after Rondo Days declared war when he kicked a squad car and (as he admitted) called a cop "a mother - - - - - - ." Theoretically, cops are supposed to ignore taunts, including the M word. In reality, they admit, it can be hard to turn the other ear. When there's a crowd and the police are struggling to restore order, an obscenity can become a "fighting word" that incites others and escalates tensions.

"He pushed the buttons that caused the conflict," Bradley says of the youth's foul language. "The book says you gotta take it. But if you call me that, you definitely have my attention. Because if I diagrammed what the word means in court -- well, I don't think the judge would let me go very far, would he?"

WHO IS DRIVING?

T

he everyday tension between police and those who are being policed has been ratcheted up a few notches by allegations that some cops have a penchant for stopping minorities.

As I learned while riding with officer Linssen, cops often don't know the race of a driver before they decide to make a stop. Many stopped drivers, however, turn out to be minorities -- at a much higher rate than the percentage of minorities living in the city. I'm surprised, riding with the cops at night, at how many of the people we see are African-Americans. I'm usually wrong guessing the race of drivers we stop because more drivers are minorities than I ever imagined. The reason is simple, cops say, although it hasn't been discussed much during the profiling debate.

"The demographics change after the sun goes down," growls one East Side cop. "There are fewer people on the street, but a higher percentage of them are minorities."

What happens after a driver is stopped -- whether he is asked to submit to a search, for example -- is also a contentious topic, with community leaders arguing that minority drivers are too often searched and cops countering that minority drivers wind up being searched more often because they often have no ID, driver's license or insurance.

"I don't know why that's true," says one officer. "Maybe it's a socioeconomic thing -- poor people who don't have jobs have cars with equipment problems or don't have licenses or can't afford to pay their tickets or their insurance so they lose their licenses. ... I can't do anything about any of that. I'm just supposed to enforce the law."

"We're oversensitive," says officer Bradley. "But we don't stop you because you're black. We stop you because your driving is out of control. We gotta keep up the fight -- if we stop doing what we're doing, then the bad guys have won."

Many officers worry that their safety may be compromised by the distractions of dealing with the profiling dispute.

"You get distracted when you walk up to a car and the first thing you do is get into a p - - - - - - match -- "You only stopped me because I'm black,' " says Ed Dion, an East Side patrol officer. "I can walk away from someone if they call me a racist, because I know I'm not. But it only takes a split second for someone to get a jump on you. And if you're worrying about what race the driver is instead of whether there's someone in the back seat or whether you're in a "kill zone' (the area around the car where officers are especially vulnerable to fire from an occupant of a stopped vehicle), well, you know what? I got three kids I'd like to see graduate from high school."

WHO IS FAIR?

I

t's not just white cops who say the profiling issue can be blown out of proportion. Adrian Saffold, 39, is an African-American East Side patrol officer who agrees with his comrades that most cops are just trying to do a difficult job as best they can.

"People always think that's the reason they're pulled over -- because they're minority," he tells me as I ride with him on a recent midnight shift. "One guy I gave a ticket to told me I just did it because he was Asian. I treat everybody the same. When I'm using my laser (speed detector), I have no way of telling what color someone is; I only know they're speeding. They're at least a block away. But you can't please everybody on this job. I figured that out fast."

Saffold says his presence at a street scene where white officers have stopped a black driver often seems to help "mellow" the situation. "Even though I'm going to do the same job as the white officers, that's their perception -- that I'll be more fair to them."

Unfortunately, he says, preconceived notions of racial bias can help spin routine stops into confrontations between minority motorists and officers.

"If you're a black motorist and you're dealing with a white cop, you might be frustrated that he has pulled you over and you act out, so now he (the cop) takes it a step forward. ... You don't have to kiss butt. Mutual respect is what we're looking for."

In a sense, the debate over racial profiling is over: Chief Finney has said flatly that racial profiling has occurred in St. Paul, and that it must stop. Officers, however, believe that many good cops have been tarnished by a few. (Only six cops -- 1 percent of the 600 St. Paul officers -- are said to have arrest stats that are clearly out of whack on the color scale.) And now all cops are facing more criticism and occasional resistance. Sometimes, it's downright weird out there.

A STOP, A WARNING

A

few minutes before Linssen arrests Dwight on Payne Avenue, he stops a car on Maryland Avenue that is driving without headlights on. It's 1:20 a.m., and we haven't seen the driver's face, but when we walk up to the car, a woman in the passenger seat is cursing and complaining about being stopped for "driving while black." Linssen quickly learns that the driver, a 37-year-old African-American named David, is not supposed to be driving at all after 11 p.m. -- he has a restricted license that permits him only to drive to and from his job. He also has his license plates on his dashboard, another violation. Mostly, however, David seems worried that his companion's vociferous complaining will bring him serious trouble.

"Damn it, Tonya, don't do this to me!" David screams at his companion, flailing his arms and pounding the steering wheel, telling her to be quiet as Linssen stands nearby.

"It's not fair," Tonya replies loudly. "We're black, the cop sees we're black -- forget it." David shouts at her again, imploring her to shut up. "Goddamn it, chill! If my lights were off, he's correct for stopping me!"

Linssen tells David that he will lose his driver's license if he gives him a ticket. So he tells him he will let him go, warning him to go right home, to put his license plates on the car, and to stop driving after 11 p.m. He calls the police dispatcher and makes a report: "Three-Nine-Eight: Black ... Male ... No ... Advised."

It's a five-second summary made by every police officer after every traffic stop these days: the cop's patrol number, followed by the race of the driver, the driver's gender, and a yes or a no for whether the driver and the car were searched -- plus a word indicating whether the driver was let go with a talking-to ("advised'') or arrested ("report" -- meaning one will be filed). The department tracks the numbers for each officer. If a problem shows up, the officer will get a talking-to.

"I don't have a clue what my numbers look like," says the 30-year-old Linssen, who was a cop in Oakdale before joining the St. Paul force two years ago. "I do my job the same way I've (always) done it. They said if it was a problem, they'd let us know."

I ask him about the agreement that Chief Finney and the department have reached with minority leaders. The frustration many officers express is evident in his voice.

"I don't see how us handing out business cards is going to solve this thing or change anyone's perception," he says. "The NAACP is teaching people how to complain about the police, rather than dealing with any racial profiling. They're trying to come up with something to make everybody happy, but the education piece is missing. To find the car with 50 rocks of crack in it, maybe it's the 10th car or the 20th car we stop. If you want to catch fish, you go where the fish are.

"You're already trusting me with an immense responsibility," says Linssen, whose father was police chief in Worthington, Minn. "I feel I am an outstanding individual, and that I'm not going to do bad things to people. I'm going to try to do good things.

"That's why I'm in this job in the first place."

-- Anonymous, August 11, 2001