The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

By January of 2011, Wisconsin cops will be required to collect data on drivers they pull over so that somebody somewhere can use it to determine precisely how racist they are.

Or, to use the more recent euphemism, how “stupid” they are.

That is not a reference to – or a shot at – the vernacular of our president. President Obama, of course, said he regretted suggesting Cambridge police officers who arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.“acted stupidly,” and I believe him. And anyway, the president had both the professor and Sgt. James Crowley over for a beer and that was a smart thing. Even smarter, he made Joe Biden drink the non-alcoholic stuff because, as everyone knows, the last thing Joe Biden needs to get him blathering is alcohol.

But I digress.

The president was not the first lawyer-turned politician to recently use the term in reference to police.

“It doesn’t happen in Milwaukee to tell you the truth,” state Rep. Pedro Colón said in late May of minorities being singled out by cops. “This may be revealing but most officers in Milwaukee have gotten over it. You just don’t make stupid stops. And you know it seems to exist primarily in the suburbs. I mean at least to the Latino community.”

“It’s all Greenfield, Greendale, you know, the northern suburbs,” Colón went on to say during a Joint Finance Committee debate over racial profiling. “And you can bet that you are going to be stopped. And that’s just the way it is, this unwritten rule. After a certain hour nobody gets to come in. We all know what the rule is. We all know these guys are getting stopped. And God forbid that they might have a beer on the way there because then they are going to be in prison or jail for five days.”

Colón , since I wrote an original column on this and after the chiefs called him, expressed some regret for specifically maligning Greenfield and Greendale. He did not, however, really apologize and he did not provide what the chiefs there really want: a single name of a driver either department has treated unfairly based on race. This, one of the chiefs says Colón admitted to him, is because the politician does not have one.

He does, however, according to a letter to the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, have a continuing belief that “there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that racial profiling does occur . . .” And he also has what he wanted when he made his accusations in the first place: a program that, within 17 months, will force police to collect data from people they stop and submit it to the state Office of Justice Assistance.

It’s still unclear what data exactly will be collected, but police are pretty certain about one thing: If this is about race it will have to include the driver’s – and that is not information that will be as easy to garner as some might think. Race, after all, is not listed on a driver’s license, and it is often hard to discern – especially when some people consider themselves several races. Police do not look forward to having to ask, especially in situations that are often contentious anyway.

“I think,” said Greendale Police Chief Rob Dams, “it is going to be horrendous if we have to walk up and say, ‘Well, what are you?’”

“What are you?” drivers are going to at least be tempted to say, “Stupid?”

Or, more likely, why should that matter?

Police, confident they are not as stupid as the politicians think they are, are not necessarily opposed to collecting data. If there are bad cops on the street nobody wants them fired quicker than the good cops. But good cops do have to wonder a few things, like whether statistics and formulas alone can really quantify racism. Just because black drivers who get pulled over receive more tickets than white drivers who get pulled over, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean the ticket writers are racists. It might mean the black drivers who get pulled over like to drive faster. (In fact, a Journal Sentinel analysis published over the weekend found exactly that.)

They also have to wonder, given Pedro Colón’s preconceptions, if anyone is really going to believe them should the data turn out to be both useful and exculpatory.
Maybe, the optimist in me thinks, everyone can take a cue from what happened recently in Washington and talk all this out over beverages. Maybe the chiefs should have Colón over for a beer.

Although, knowing Pedro Colón, he’d probably decline out of fear of ending up in jail for five days.

-August 5, 2009

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