http://www.apbonline.com/newscenter/breakingnews/2000/09/28/whitehouse0928_01.html
WASHINGTON (AP) – Two White House aides said they were traumatized, embarrassed and humiliated when gun-wielding police stopped them in a Washington suburb, erroneously believing they were driving a stolen car.
Unbelievable! Read the article. Very disturbing.
Zette
Jesus! I’m sputtering mad after reading that! That poor couple.
So let me get this straight. First of all, sure, it’s an unfortunate mistake. But from what I read, a car of that type had been stolen by a black male in that same area in the last 45 minutes. Wasn’t it only logical that the police thought they found the suspect?
If the same car were stolen by a white guy, and a white White House aide were driving it, wouldn’t they have stopped him at gunpoint as well?
Don’t get me wrong, of course these people were scared shitless. But “stopped for the bogus crime of driving while black”? Fearing for their lives?
Isn’t that just a tad exagerated?
I totaly beleive that cops use racial profiling. How hard can it be to screen cops so that racial issues don’t happen. I think we get to a point that most police officers have an authority tripgoing on and a need to get back at certain types of people. I hate when things like this happens. And it takes white house empolyees to make it public again!!!
the car was reportedly “similar” to the one that was stolen?
Don’t they have license plates? I thought SOP was :
Black caddy reported stolen, license plate #1234.
Spot black caddy. License plate #4567. Call in to check plate #. two alternatives: Plate #4567 belongs to black caddy, ok that is NOT the stolen car. Plate #4567 belongs to a pink Toyota, ok, that MIGHT be the stolen car, and therefore stop the vehicle.
If they didn’t go through those simple procedures, then, yea, cops were in the wrong.
Coldie,
The problem isn’t that they were stopped, but look at what they did to them! Handcuffed, guns pointed at them? For what? They could have run the plates or asked for ID instead of treating them like that. Very wrong, in my opinion.
Zette
Well, I’m no expert on police practise in the US, hence my implicit question: would they have done otherwise if a white man were driving the car (and the car thief had also been white)? In other words, assuming the cops didn’t have plate numbers (besides, they could have switched them easily in 45 mins), was it unreasonable to handcuff a possible suspect and put him in a police car?
Damn. I thought I was going to find out what decade we were in. Remember before the millenium when people said “What comes after the '90’s? The '00’s? The Aughts?”
Oh well. Have to start a new thread, I guess.
Coldfire, see my post above. SOP is to check license plates.
Cop cars here are linked by radio, they call in plate # and they get the info very quickly.
So, the first thing they SHOULD have done is check it. The head cop who defended it didn’t say “and they didn’t have a license plate” or anything else In our country, you MUST have a plate or not be on the road. When you buy a car new, you get a temp dealer’s plate, so if the car didn’t have a plate they were justified in stopping it. If it did, they should check the plate before wasting their time stopping every black caddy -for example- in DC.
Coldy - no I don’t think it’s unreasonable to handcuff a possible suspect and put him in a police car. However, taking the driver’s license and calling in the info for a positive ID check usually preceeds an arrest unless the officer saw the crime being committed. In this case, the officers only saw a car being driven. I believe they should have stopped the vehicle, ran the plates and checked ID first, since they only stopped a car matching the decription of the stolen vehicle. Many officers run the plates first before pulling the car over.
I don’t know what’s going through the officer’s head, but automatically jumping to the conclusion he did it because they were black seems pretty unfair. It’s possible he saw a car and driver matching the description and got over-eager. Before we go condemning the man, let’s hear the whole story.
I also believe this quote is very important in all this:
"Bob Nash and his wife, Janis Kearney, both of whom are black, said in a three-page statement Wednesday in response to media inquiries that they were victims of racial profiling and were stopped for the “bogus crime of driving while black.”
Note the words in bold. To me this implies that Nash and Kearsey were going to just go on with their lives until the media latched onto it looking for a story.
Makes sense, wring. In that case, it seems a bit prejudiced alright. The only explanation I could think of is that the police hoped to avoid a dangerous chase this way.
FWIW, cars need to have plates here too, and police don’t seem to use their guns as quickly as in the US. And I’m glad they don’t. I mean, after all, it’s just a possible car theft, not a hostage situation or something.
If the police had reason to suspect them, detaining the couple while checking out their ID and driver’s license would have been sufficient. The drawn guns and handcuffs were waaaaaaaay over the top. I believe that this was racial profiling, which is all too common in the U.S. I have a hunch that the police would have been less aggressive if the couple had been white. :sigh:
Coldy, let me explain something to you about policemen in the U.S. (there are no policewomen):
All police here are bigoted, white-trash guys from Benshonhurst, Brooklyn. Even other states import their cops from Brooklyn.
All cops—being white, of course—hate all blacks, hispanics and gays. Oh, yeah, there also are no gay cops.
They spend most of their off-hours framing innocent citizens for crimes actually committed by rich white guys.
Oh, and all the people on Death Row? Innocent, every one of 'em. They were all set up by “The Liberal Media,” an organization that goes around dealing drugs and murdering people, then finding folks off the street to set up, for ratings.
That being said, what happened to those folks in D.C. WAS indeed totally out of line and very badly handled. And yes, racial profiling does exist—why not talk to some cops, get their side of the story and try to find out why? And how it can be stopped?
I just want to make a couple points.
[ul]
[li]The Media. As all of you are presumably smart enough to know, the media is capable of misreporting a story. There are several ways this can be done and what I suspect here is the newspaper hasn’t printed all the pertinent facts. I’ll bet there’s far more to the story than you’ve seen in those few paragraphs. I’ll also bet that many of you aren’t really this credulous about many of the things you read in the paper or hear on the news. Why do you choose to believe, in this instance, that you’ve heard the whole story?[/li][li]License Plates. Let me tell you how to spoof a license plate check. (And if I were to ever steal a car, this is exactly what I’d do.) Take the plates from the stolen car, put them on a similar car, and then put the second set of plates on the stolen car that you’re driving. The cops then run the plates on your stolen car and they come up clean. It’s unlikely the owner of the car that now has the original stolen plates on it is going to notice a different tag number any time too soon. It’s a pretty simple trick.[/li][/ul]
I find it odd that a police department would be using racial profiling so soon after a civil rights investigation. They are certainly going to be under quite a bit more scrutiny than would normally be the case.
**
Yes, UB, a theif COULD do this. Do you have any info that this is what Actually DOES happen?
IME (working with folks who steal cars):
a. Basic impulse joy riding folk - Wow, lookee at that car, wouldn’t it be cool. They will NOT take the time to do anything like that. The person in this case, their aim is to drive the car, so they’d be driving around.
b. Car theft for profit (for either chop shops or resale) while they DO have an agenda in mind, to find another similar car switch plates etc means that you’re spending a whole lot MORE time out driving the stolen one than you’d want. For these folks, the less time you’re on the road, the better.
I do agree that we need to take media quick reports with a grain of salt the size of Detroit.
However, I don’t believe that it’s SOP for a cop to have the driver exit the car and handcuff them etc. for a stolen car report BEFORE one has run the plates. and, I don’t believe (based on my analysis of your point, and my experience with theives) that the plate was switched or that it’s common practice.
will look forward to more info about this.
I’m sorry, wring. I didn’t mean to suggest that swapping plates was any kind of normal procedure. I was just trying to demonstrate a method of tricking a plate check. You are correct about the vast majority of car thefts, as you already know. Those reasons for theft do seem to preclude any need to swap plates.
And neither do I believe that an auto-theft suspect would normally be 'cuffed prior to a plate check. I’m at a loss to explain the actions of the cops, but I still don’t believe we’ve seen the entire story. I’ll see if I can dig up some additional news stories on this.
This story has a number of things not reported in the initial link. Among them, both vehicles had temporary tag, the wife was in a separate vehicle and left it to assist her husband, and the cops were looking for a car-jacker rather than a simple thief. There’s that large grain of salt.
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/default-2000927224126.htm
[Edited by UncleBeer on 09-29-2000 at 10:59 AM]
Whoops, I need to correct my statement above that the wife was in a separate vehicle. She was not. She did, however, exit the vehicle of her own volition, not at an officer’s request. I can see that the cops may have seen this as a threatening action.
Here’s another story from the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33645-2000Sep28.html
Both of these additional stories say the cops were told that the perpetrator was armed.
Uncle Beer, thank you for posting the additional links (though the Post one didn’t work for me). I am glad to see that, in this case, anyway, racial profiling does not seem to be a prevailing factor.
I recently moved from Rhode Island, where racial profiling has become an issue of much debate. In fact, the governor recently signed a bill forbidding racial profiling, and calling for a two-year study of traffic stops.
In part, this issue has come to the fore in RI because of a recent “friendly fire” shooting by the Providence Police Department. A black officer, off-duty and not in uniform, but armed, made an attempt to assist fellow officers at a fight scene at which a gun had been drawn. I don’t know all the details, but apparently, off-duty officers are obliged to do this. He was shot and killed by two white officers, who were ultimately not charged with murder.
That’s a very short and incomplete summary of a fairly complex incident which brought to light the concerns of many people in the community regarding racial profiling and racism in general. Hopefully, increased awareness of profiling and improved race relations will result, but I’m not holding my breath.
UB, you’ve done a great job of trying to provide some balance and reality into this topic. Thank you! Hey folks, we’re Dopers – we need to have a little UncleBeer voice in our heads warning us any time we read things like this and the bells go off.
How many times have YOU read/heard/seen a story in the media, for which you knew all the details? Maybe it was an accident at which you were a witness, or it was about the company you work for. How many times have the media gotten the facts wrong on the story? Have you, as has often happened to me, sat there and said, “Hey wait, that’s not exactly how it happened!” or “Oh hey, this story has it all wrong”? Well, this sort of thing happens with GREAT frequency, especially in these shorter news stories where the reporter might not spend the time to write out a balanced story. There could be a number of reasons – usually a tight deadline is right up there. But it is quite possible that the reporter has an agenda – in this case, perhaps making sure any incident that might vaguely sound like racism.
Don’t believe reporters can be biased? They’re people, too. And while they are supposed to uphold the ethics written down by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), you can only be “fair and unbiased” within your own outlook on life. That is, perhaps you, like so many other college students, are fully indoctrinated in sensitivity training. In the idealism of your youth, perhaps you believe Ernesto Guevera was the second coming, and see nothing wrong with socialism, and that all rich people are greedy pigs who should give all their money away to the poor. Thrusted into a media job, I don’t care HOW fair you think you are, your reporting is still going to be done through your own colored glasses.
If reporting the wrong facts weren’t bad enough, the media has also been known to go hunting for adventure when there isn’t any – the “burning of Black churches across America” that happened a few years ago turned out to be pretty much overblown. But ya know, that stuff sells copy.
Okay, so what’s Baglady getting to with all this? Mostly that you should never naively believe everything you read in the papers. The media is NOTORIOUS for getting the facts wrong, or only presenting portions of a story. Tight deadlines and pressure to produce copy means most reporters do NOT take the time to write Pulitzer Prize-winning articles each time. They are also very bad about CORRECTING erroneous information they wrote (and writing three lines of copy in the Ombudsman’s column isn’t quite the same as screaming inch-tall headlines on the front page the day before).
As for “racial profiling,” there is a difference between pulling people over willy-nilly just because someone’s of a certain race, and pulling someone over because they fit your description. How is it “racial profiling” when the description says, “Man in 40s, roughly 6’ tall, black, driving a particular model sedan”??? It’s an unfortunate fact of life that one’s race is also a physical description. If on the other hand, the description was, “Man in 40s, roughly 6’ tall, Mormon, driving a particular model sedan,” how are you supposed to use THAT to make a physical identity?
You know they conduct racial profiling at airports too, but you don’t hear much about THAT – because they’re targeting Arabs and other Middle Easterners (and I guess that’s not as sexy a story). Hell, US customs agents conduct “tattoo profiling” too – did you know that? They look out for Japanese men with extensive tattoos creeping out from under their clothes, because it’s a traditional sign of Yakuza (Japanese mob) membership. You don’t hear about that either.
In this particular case, they already HAD a report that a black male had been seen stealing a car. There were other facts that made the police want to be very careful… and if they thought the perp was armed, you KNOW the cops won’t take any chances. They DO come at you with their guns drawn. What if it HAD been the perp, and he decided to come out of his car shooting?? What would you have said then? “Those cops are so DUMB! They knew the guy might have been armed, and they just walked up to the car like they were ordering donuts or something.”