FOR THOSE of us who advocate a colorblind approach to race, the facts on the ground occasionally conflict with our ideals. One recent challenge has been the collection of DNA samples from African-American men by the Charlottesville police in the serial rapist investigation. Far from undermining our ideals, these examples of racial profiling renew the urgency for a colorblind society so that such incidents do not continue.
The Charlottesville police announced last week that they had suspended the practice, but later announced they had altered the policy. This was after they had approached 197 African-American men and asked to swab their cheeks to collect DNA samples. The samples were used to exclude the possibility that those men were the serial rapist.
Prof. Stephen Smith, who teaches criminal law at the Law School, noted that the "dragnet," as its opponents called it, was purely voluntary. "The police are just asking men fitting the general description of the rapist to agree to give a swab," for which they needed no legal cause at all, he explained. In other words, the police could have legally approached anyone at random.
Still, the way the police approached individuals was at once deliberately selective in their process and arbitrary in their criteria. "It would make no sense to require the police to search members of other races when the victims all describe the assailant as a black male," Smith said. This reasoning, though logically sound, would be irrational and unfair if the police started picking out black men at random. While that is not what they did, 116 of the men were approached on nothing more than citizens' reports of "suspicious behavior," according to The Washington Post. The others were approached because of criminal histories or reported resemblance to the composite sketch of the suspect.
This incredibly broad and undefined standard can hardly give police a careful, deliberate basis to confront 116 people in the streets and at their work or home. Appropriately, the police announced last Friday that they would now only approach individuals after a preliminary investigation.
Even if they were technically free to refuse, it is unclear if those who were approached were adequately informed of their rights. At a University forum last week, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo indicated the police did not have a standard, carefully worded script when they approached suspects. Longo, who is currently on leave for the week and unable to be reached, did not respond to repeated requests to answer some lingering questions: Given the enormous potential for misunderstandings, what exactly did the police tell the men they approached? What happened to the men who refused to submit to the sampling? Did they receive closer scrutiny or remain on a suspects' list?
As a legal matter, approaching the men for voluntary DNA samples was technically no different than the police approaching potential witnesses at a crime scene to ask them questions. In practice, however, they present profoundly different dangers to individual liberty. For one thing, there was no reason to believe any of the men approached on the basis of "suspicious behavior" had been at the scene of any crime.
More importantly, this was not merely a case of oral questioning; the police were building a DNA database of individuals, the majority of whom had no prior criminal history. While the police emphasized the database would not be used for other purposes, and later announced that it would eventually be destroyed and samples returned upon individuals' request, innocent individuals should simply not be asked to put their genetic information into a government database, absent an ironclad protection against misuse. We should respect police officers and prosecutors who dedicate their lives to putting away criminals, but surely even they would admit that such power always carries the risk of abuse.
Admittedly, the color of one's skin can be a neutral descriptive factor in a criminal investigation -- just like the color or length of one's hair, height or build. In our society, unfortunately, race is not just skin deep. It has profound political, cultural, and sociological elements rooted in history. There simply hasn't been the same discrimination against tall people or short people as there has been against African Americans. Thus, the police should be especially careful when using race. Instead of acting on vague reports of "suspicious behavior," they should have required something substantially more to go on to avoid singling out more than 100 black men.
Not only did the Charlottesville police investigation diminish the dignity of innocent individuals, it racially polarized the community. Black leaders like African-American Affairs Dean Rick Turner were instrumental in persuading the police to re-examine the practice. Still, this was an offense against our basic values, regardless of race. Everyone -- whether it is police departments or university admissions offices -- must be more careful in using broad racial classifications that denigrate our respect for individual rights, and we should all condemn such abuses when they occur.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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