Most people have heard or read the acronym "DWB," which stands for "
Driving While Black," or in many cases "Brown," derived from DWI—Driving While Intoxicated. In certain parts of the country, "DWI" can also mean "Driving While Indian," which this story,
Driving While Indian: A Refresher Course by Mary Annette Pember, illustrates:
On a dark country road in Indian Country, the lessons of childhood come back quickly when the police pull you over. As a nation debates police violence, we should know that Native people are the ethnicity most likely to be killed by law enforcement.
When the officer rapped loudly with a flashlight on the passenger-side window of my car, my 16-year-old, special-needs daughter flung her arms around me like a frightened kitten climbing up my pants leg.
I tried to calm her as I rolled the window down. I could make out no details of the officer because he shined the flashlight in our eyes. The squad car's flashing lights were blinding.
This story did not end in tragedy—meaning death—but the scars that are left by the experience of racial profiling of drivers who are not-white are indelible.
Follow me below the fold for more on the perils for people of color behind the wheel.
In this automobile-oriented nation, people of color who must drive do so knowing that no matter the model, make, color, or condition of their car, they have to add to their driver's education the additional burden of hyper-awareness of being in the wrong color skin behind the wheel.
This is so problematic a phone app has been developed that facilitates interactions with the police.
The purpose of this App is to give Black people, people of color, and others who may be targeted for traffic stops, helpful information and tools to improve traffic stop experiences, safety, accountability and justice.
The ACLU has developed a "Mobile Justice" app along similar lines to record and upload encounters with police.
While new technology is wonderful, the underlying problem of racial profiling it addresses needs to be dealt with. Getting behind the wheel when you are the wrong color could be a death sentence—and not from drunk drivers.
Check out this article from Mother Jones, Driving While Black Has Actually Gotten More Dangerous in the Last 15 Years:
Walter Scott's death in South Carolina, at the hands of now-fired North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, is one of several instances from the past year when a black man was killed after being pulled over while driving. No one knows exactly how often traffic stops turn deadly, but studies in Arizona, Missouri, Texas, Washington have consistently shown that cops stop and search black drivers at a higher rate than white drivers. Last week, a team of researchers in North Carolina found that traffic stops in Charlotte, the state's largest city, showed a similar racial disparity—and that the gap has been widening over time.
The researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill analyzed more than 1.3 million traffic stops and searches by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers for a 12-year period beginning in 2002, when the state began requiring police to collect such statistics. In their analysis of the data, collected and made public by the state's Department of Justice, the researchers found that black drivers, despite making up less than one-third of the city's driving population, were twice as likely to be subject to traffic stops and searches as whites.
A similar study,
Driving While Black or Brown, was undertaken in Arizona by the ACLU. Frankly, I'm not sure if it has gotten worse at all. I think we may just have better data. From my perspective, it has always been a nightmare.
I've always been aware of my own peril. I have memories of being a child and driving through certain areas of the U.S. with my parents, aware that my dad was fearful. My mom's jaw would be clenched, and my dad gripped the steering wheel, looking frequently in the rearview mirror, tensing if he saw police cars. We had to be so careful, and daddy always drove below the speed limit. We were rarely stopped, which probably had more to do with the fact that daddy looked white than with his speed. When I was in college, one of the most perilous roadways in the U.S. was the New Jersey Turnpike. Driving back to New York City with schoolmates from Washington, D.C., in the 1960s, we had to make it through Prince George's County, Maryland, notorious for police interference with blacks in cars, then through an ugly stretch of New Jersey where if you were black or Latino-looking, you were driving through trouble. That situation continued for decades.
Many of you may not remember this incident, which created an uproar and was reported in the New York Times in Records Show New Jersey Police Withheld Data on Race Profiling:
State Police on April 23, 1998. That was the day two white troopers fired 11 shots at a van they had stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, wounding three of the four unarmed black and Hispanic occupants and setting off a national furor over racial profiling. Lawyers for the troopers, who are charged with attempted murder, say they fired in self-defense when the van began backing toward them.
And more, in
2 New Jersey State Troopers Indicted in Turnpike Shooting:
NEWARK, Sept. 7— Two state troopers were indicted today on attempted murder and assault charges in a shooting after a routine traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1998 that left three of four unarmed young black and Hispanic men wounded. The incident focused national attention on decades-old charges that the state police often stopped drivers solely on the basis of race -- a practice known as racial profiling. That attention led to a series of policy and political turnabouts, including an acknowledgment by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman that racial profiling was commonplace.
The indictments against the troopers, John Hogan, 29, and James Kenna, 28, who are both white, were handed up today by a grand jury in Trenton. Prosecutors say that on April 23, 1998, the two troopers stopped a van carrying three young black men and a Hispanic man on the turnpike near Washington Township and fired 11 shots at them. The troopers have said that the driver of the van had backed up in an attempt to hit them.
The indictment charges the two troopers with the attempted murder of Daniel Reyes, a passenger in the van, and with aggravated assault in the wounding of Mr. Reyes, 21, of Queens, and two other passengers, Leroy Jermaine Grant, 24, and Rayshawn Brown, 21, both of Manhattan. The driver of the van, Keshon Lamonte Moore, 22, of Manhattan, was not shot. The troopers face a maximum prison term of 20 years on the attempted murder charge and 10 years on the assault charge.
The case became the subject of a documentary, "4 Chosen":
4 CHOSEN is a true story about courage and survival that began when the dreams of four young men were suddenly shattered in a hail of bullets on April 23, 1998. Danny Reyes, Jermaine Grant, Keshon Moore, and Rayshawn Brown were on their way to North Carolina to attend a basketball clinic, but never made it passed the New Jersey Turnpike. Without just cause or provocation, two New Jersey state troopers pulled them over and fired 13 shots into the van, seriously injuring three of the boys. Enlisting the help of attorney David Ironman, the boys fought for justice. Together they broke open one of the largest racial profiling cases in American history.
Sadly, years later people's efforts to get justice in the courts
was frustrated:
TRENTON, Jan. 14, 2002 Nearly four years after they shot three unarmed men during a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, two New Jersey troopers were allowed to plead guilty to reduced charges today and were spared both jail time and probation.
The turnpike shooting came to symbolize the frustration of black and Latino motorists who had complained for years that they were being unfairly and illegally singled out by police officers based solely on their skin color. And it helped ignite a heated national debate about the proper use of profiling in police work, particularly in drug interdiction policy, with critics calling it racist but some law enforcement officials saying it was simply good police work.
The legal finale to the case today outraged longtime critics of racial profiling. Civil rights leaders have vowed to press state officials to discipline the supervisors who taught racial profiling and to adopt a new law making it a crime.
The ACLU produced a report in 1999, Driving While Black: Racial Profiling On Our Nation's Highways:
On a hot summer afternoon in August 1998, 37-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Rossano V. Gerald and his young son Gregory drove across the Oklahoma border into a nightmare. A career soldier and a highly decorated veteran of Desert Storm and Operation United Shield in Somalia, SFC Gerald, a black man of Panamanian descent, found that he could not travel more than 30 minutes through the state without being stopped twice: first by the Roland City Police Department, and then by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
During the second stop, which lasted two-and-half hours, the troopers terrorized SFC Gerald's 12-year-old son with a police dog, placed both father and son in a closed car with the air conditioning off and fans blowing hot air, and warned that the dog would attack if they attempted to escape. Halfway through the episode – perhaps realizing the extent of their lawlessness – the troopers shut off the patrol car's video evidence camera.
Fast forward to 2015. Most motorists have smart phones with cameras. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites, stories that would have been local in the past get rapid national distribution. Still, high-profile black people, are still black:
Chris Rock Is Taking a Selfie Every Time He Gets Pulled Over by the Police:
That's the message Chris Rock paired with a selfie on Monday, capturing what is apparently the third time in just seven weeks the comedian has been pulled over by police. It's not known why police stopped Rock during these three separate incidents, but the succinct caption alone sums up what's clearly a routine event for him as a black man in America driving what we can assume is a nice car.Colorlines coverage added some interesting data to the Rock reportage:
Rock's choice to share his experience is bringing the issue of racial profiling back to the popular topics discussed on Twitter. The Washington Post reports, citing the Department of Justice "Police Behavior During Traffic and Street Stops" data report for 2011:
Black drivers are about 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Native Americans are stopped most frequently of all. The federal survey found that relatively speaking, far fewer blacks than whites were pulled over for speeding. Instead, the cops stopped them because of a "vehicle defect," to check a record, or for some other or unspecified reason. Black drivers were also about three times as likely as white drivers to be searched after they were stopped. [Emphasis added.]
I remember being made aware of the "Driving While Indian" issue through a comment made here by
Carter Camp:
In South Dakota the license plates are coded for counties and several counties are all reservation. So we get stopped for venturing out of our counties as well as for looking brown.
A funny thing is that a lot of native people liked to hang 'dream catchers' from their mirrors so they passed a law against having anything hanging down. Of course it's mainly used as a way to stop Indians when there is no other cause.
All across the southwest the anti-immigrant hate laws are increasing the DWI/DWB stops.
DWI now has a
Facebook page.
Denialists who insist this has nothing to do with race and is simply an issue of class—insinuating that black, brown, and native people drive raggedy cars, therefore they get stopped more—are spinning their racist rear wheels.
I remember chuckling in 2011 when I wrote the BWB racial profiling story of a well-heeled black professional in the Philly area who initiated a lawsuit, "Driving While Black: cops messed with the wrong dude."
The Pennsylvania ACLU reports little change in Philly:
Almost four years after Philadelphia agreed to reform its policing practices to reduce racial profiling, little improvement has been made. Philadelphia police still stop and frisk African-American and Hispanic pedestrians at rates substantially higher than whites. Philadelphia, unfortunately, is not alone in targeting minorities for stops and pat-downs. Most cities that keep data on pedestrian stops show similar disparities. Perhaps more troubling, however, is that few police departments require their officers to record any data on pedestrian stops or pat-down searches, making it impossible to know the breadth of the problem.
So whether it's DWI, DWB, or simply walking and breathing while black, brown, or Indian, we have a national dis-ease called "racism" to attack. We can't change our skin colors. Changing cars or economic status won't fix it.
Changing racist attitudes and systemic practices will. One step in the right direction can be supporting legislation to end racial profiling:
The End Racial Profiling Act Introduced in Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate
S. 1038 / H.R. 2581 WOULD CREATE A NATIONAL PROHIBITION AGAINST RACIAL PROFILING BY LAW ENFORCEMENT
The End Racial Profiling Act has now been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator Cardin (MD) (S. 1038) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (MI) (H.R. 2851). The End Racial Profiling Act comprehensively addresses the insidious practice of racial profiling by law enforcement on five levels: first, it clearly defines the racially discriminatory practice of racial profiling by law enforcement at all levels; second, it creates a federal prohibition against racial profiling; thirdly, it mandates data collection so we can fully assess the true extent of the problem; fourth, it provides funding for the retraining of law enforcement officials on how to discontinue and prevent the use of racial profiling; and fifth, it holds law enforcement agencies that continue to use racial profiling accountable. We need to urge Members of both the House and Senate to co-sponsor and help move the bill through to passage as soon as possible.
Given the current composition of the Congress, we need to elect legislators who will be willing to support this bill and other civil rights measures.