Erasing the "Thin Blue Line".

Often accused of racism and frequently facing federal probes into their conduct, police across the nation are pulling out of minority neighborhoods.

In major cities across the nation, criminals are winning the war for the streets -- not because they are better armed or better organized than the police, but because the police have simply withdrawn from the battlefield. They have done so not out of cowardice or indifference, but because it has become all but impossible to enforce the law in predominantly black neighborhoods without incurring charges of "racism."

"I hear the same story from officers all across the country," reports James Carnell, a police officer from Boston who edits Pox Centurion, the publication of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association. "They know that they're just one accusation away from losing everything," Carnell told THE NEW AMERICAN. "So many of them just figure that they get paid the same whether they enforce the law or not. These aren't bad cops. They have professional pride and they want to do their jobs. But they still are afraid that if they have a run-in with a member of an officially approved minority group, they'll be tagged as 'racists' and become the focus of a Justice Department investigation. So many of them just sit back and pretend that they don't see anything. It's a growing problem nationally."

"It's real. It's happening," veteran Seattle patrolman Eric Michl told the June 26th Seattle Times. "Parking under a shady tree to work on a crossword puzzle is a great alternative to being labeled a racist and being dragged through an inquest, a review board, an FBI and U.S. Attorney's investigation and a lawsuit." Michl described a traffic stop involving a black man whose erratic driving and antsy personal behavior suggested that he was high on cocaine. "Something was very suspicious," observed the 17-year police veteran. "If he were any other race, I would have probably arrested him on the spot. But then I started thinking, 'What if he's on cocaine, what if we get in a fight and he dies, and then we find out he's only guilty of a suspended license.' I don't want to see my name in the papers."

Defying his policeman's instincts, which dictated that he take the young man into custody, Officer Michi instead walked back to his cruiser to run a background check, which revealed that the vehicle had been stolen. By the time this was known, however, the suspect had gotten away. Although he was eventually caught, Michl -- who, like most policemen, enlisted to protect the law-abiding against the lawless -- believes that the incident illustrates the dangers that have resulted from the relentless demoralization of local police agencies. "There are a lot of us who are extremely frustrated about this," he observes.

Seattle Police Officer Al Warner reports similar frustrations. Warner describes a traffic stop near a bar in Seattle's Central Area during which four black men were arrested for smoking marijuana. Predictably enough, they accused Officer Warner of "racially profiling" them -- a rather implausible charge to make, in light of the fact that Warner is black. "It's the catch phrase now," comments Warner. "If I were an African-American drug dealer here, that's the way I'd play the game. It intimidates officers."

Indeed, this is the way that street criminals, along with their political allies, are "playing the game" -- and law-abiding black Americans are the most immediate victims. Washington Times police reporter Fred Reed points out that when police are intimidated by the prospect of professional and personal ruin, "the effect will of course be that black neighborhoods will get less law enforcement. Criminals won't know why life is suddenly easier, but they will notice that it is easier. They will become bolder. The quality of life in the neighborhood will go down. The papers will note that after a lull, crime is going up again.... There will be demands to hire more cops, who also won't do anything if they're smart."

The cycle described by Reed is already well underway. It is most visible in Cincinnati, which was the scene earlier this year of a destructive race riot that was supposedly triggered by the lethal police shooting of Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old black man with numerous outstanding misdemeanor warrants. As black mobs tore apart neighborhoods, destroyed and pillaged businesses, and beat white pedestrians and motorists, radical attorney Ken Lawson applauded the rioters for giving "whites a better understanding of what it feels like to be a random target of violence just because of the color of your skin."

After a state of emergency and curfew were declared by Mayor Charles Luken, the riots subsided and a semblance of order was restored. But in a sense the riot was erely contained to predominantly black neighborhoods, where it actually gained intensity -- in large measure because the city police were withdrawn. "In the weeks after the April riots, gunfire crackled at an alarming rate through Over-the-Rhine, West End, Avondale, Bond Hill and other predominantly African-American neighborhoods ... neighborhoods that paid a toll in broken glass and looted buildings," reported the Cincinnati Enquirer.

In the aftermath of the riots and the successful campaign to demonize the police, observes Robert L. Woodson of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, "crime is breaking records" in Cincinnati. "There have been a total of 74 shootings, leaving 86 people wounded or killed, compared with nine shootings and 11 victims for the same period last year," wrote Woodson in an August 17th Washington Times commentary. As is the case elsewhere, the Cincinnati police "have decided that the risks of being pilloried as racists are so great, that they have pulled back in a process that can be clearly defined as police nullification."

Innocent black residents of inner-city regions are the primary victims of "police nullification," but they are not the only ones. When riots erupted during last February's Mardi Gras celebrations in Philadelphia and Seattle -- much of it taking the form of racial attacks by black hoodlums upon white pedestrians -- the police reaction was curiously subdued. The same was true during the early phase of the April riot in Cincinnati.

"If you want to make 20 traffic stops a shift and chase every dope dealer you see, you go right ahead," advised a recent issue of the newsletter of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police. "Just remember that if something goes wrong, or you make the slightest mistake in that split second, it could result in having your worst nightmare come true for you and your family, and City Hall will sell you out."

"Police nullification," "de-policing," "selective disengagement" -- however the process may be packaged, what it amounts to is this: The "Thin Blue Line" separating the law-abiding from the lawless is being erased.

Demoralization and Attrition

"The police can't win," wrote Fred Reed in the August issue of Soldier of Fortune. "They can, however, avoid losing. The answer is simply not to enforce the law against blacks, at least in black neighborhoods." Reed has received letters from police officers in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Nebraska, Pittsburgh, Indiana, and the Washington, D.C., area. "In sum, what they said was, 'if that's what the people want, that's what they'll get. Nothing.'"

"It's happening here," wrote a veteran officer. "Our mayor pretty much came out and said the department is full of racists and we [race] profile all the time. He didn't use those words. He didn't have to. So, many of us are opting out, myself included.... On our department we can't win at all. No support from even our own supervisor, nor the brass. So, what to do? Protect your [backside] and do as little as possible."

"Police officers are not robots, we are people, but we are people who can lose it all for trying to protect society," wrote another officer from Maryland's Prince George County, a predominantly black suburb of Washington, D.C. "In an instant your whole life's work can be gone, ruined after a grand jury, a Justice Department inquiry, or just Jack Johnson [a pious district attorney] prosecuting you in the court of public opinion."

Many other urban police departments are finding it all but impossible to recruit new officers. "Police departments in cities across the nation are facing what some call a personnel crisis, with the number of recruits at record lows, an increasing number of experienced officers turning down promotions to sergeant or lieutenant, and many talented senior officers declining offers to become police chiefs," reported the July 30th New York Tunes. Cynthia Brown, publisher of American Police Beat magazine, told the Times that this year, for the first time, her publication ran "advertisements for police recruits from a dozen cities, including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, and smaller cities like Santa Cruz, California, and Sheridan, Wyoming."

"If this was a business," commented former New York City deputy police commissioner Jeremy Travis, "we'd be in a panic mode." While there are no nationwide statistics on police recruitment, findings from major metropolitan police departments illustrate an ominous trend:

* Last year in Chicago, despite an intense recruiting drive, 5,263 applicants signed up to take the police examination; by way of comparison, there were 10,290 applicants in 1997, and 36,211 in 1991.

* More than 1,700 officers left New York City's 41,000-member force in 2000. With a large portion of the force soon to complete 20 years in service -- after which officers can retire with a full pension -- the attrition rate is expected to climb. The number of captains departing the force in 2000 tripled from the year before. And the number of new applicants has sharply declined -- from 32,000 in 1996, to 13,136 in 2001.

* The Los Angeles Police Department, which has been under a constant state of siege since the 1991 Rodney King incident, has also found it all but impossible to recruit new officers: There were only 19 recruits at the LAPD's academy class in June, a record low.

* Miami's police department has been reduced to 883 officers, which is well below its authorized strength of 1,045 officers. "This is increasingly becoming a more miserable job by the day," Sergeant John Rivera, president of the Miami-Dade County Police Benevolent Association, complained to the Times.

* The Seattle police force is having trouble finding officers willing to take the sergeants' exam, or sergeants willing to seek promotion to lieutenant. Only 86 officers took this year's sergeants' exam, and a mere, 10 sergeants underwent the exam for lieutenant.

* Many cities, including Denver, Colorado; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Riverside, California; and Prescott Valley, Arizona, have found it nearly impossible to recruit qualified police chiefs. "I would absolutely not take a job as a police chief," John Diaz, an assistant police chief in Seattle, told the Times. "The politics of being a police chief have become so insane no one wants the job. I work an 11-hour day, but our chief is here before me every day and doesn't leave until I'm gone, and all he gets is attacked in the media all the time."

The unfolding crisis of "de-policing" may puzzle those who think the federal government has been working diligently to bolster local police forces. After all, didn't the Clinton administration, with Republican congressional support, put 100,000 new policemen on America's streets? Haven't police departments been given additional financial and material support from Washington?

While the much-heralded "100,000 new police" somehow failed to materialize, it is true that the 1994 omnibus crime bill offered federal subsidies to local police agencies throughout the country. With these new subsidies, however, came increased federal scrutiny and federal control. The Clinton-era Justice Department, working in tandem with radical groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the ACLU, and kindred "civil rights" groups, used this leverage to conduct a war upon local police departments nationwide. Bill Capretta, president of Capitol City Lodge No. 9 of the Fraternal Order of Police in Columbus, Ohio, points out that the federal government's objective is "to impose federal standards on police departments nationwide."

The federal strategy in its war on local police departments is to depict them as riddled with corruption and racism -- and in that struggle the concept of "racial profiling" is the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon.

"Racial Profiling"

The term "profiling," noted Officer James Carnell in an article for American Police Beat magazine, "began to appear in the media about five or six years ago. Some overzealous police used these 'profiles' as part of an effort to interdict the flow of drugs and guns into the inner cities. Some mistakes were undoubtedly made and some people were unfairly stopped, questioned and searched. Unfortunately, the nine justices of the Supreme Court and the staff of the ACLU are not always available at 2 AM for street corner consultation as to the fine differences between 'probable cause' and 'reasonable suspicion' versus common sense, police experience, and gut instinct."

To date, not so much as a particle of evidence has been produced to document that police in any jurisdiction have followed racial profiles, as opposed to using suspect profiles in their pursuit of criminals. The term "racial profiling" is an invention of race-baiting leftist groups that seek to demonize police as bigots. "The media, wittingly or unwittingly in concert with anti-police activists, has employed the profiling accusation so carelessly that its existence and use by police has become an accepted fact," observes Officer Carnell.

In addition, it is not widely understood that the use of suspect profiles is a federal innovation created by the unconstitutional "War on Drugs." Using intelligence on drug courier routes, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Customs Service created composite profiles of suspects to guide drug interdiction efforts by local and state law enforcement authorities.

"The DEA taught state troopers some common identifying signs of drug couriers," including "the ethnic makeup of drug-trafficking organizations," recalls Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute. "A typical DEA report from the early 1990s noted that 'large-scale interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians, and black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack.' The 1999 'Hero-in Trends' report out of Newark declared that 'predominant wholesale traffickers are Colombian, followed by Dominicans, Chinese, West African/Nigerian, Pakistani, Hispanic and Indian. Mid-levels are dominated by Dominicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans and Nigerians."

Some self-designated "civil rights" activists insist that "the war on drugs immediately became a war on minorities," notes MacDonald. It is reasonable to believe that some, perhaps many, law-abiding black and Hispanic Americans have been harassed as a result of the federally generated "profiles" used in the so-called drug war. But this cannot fairly be considered an illustration of institutional racism" on the part of local police, who after all were trying to keep drugs and criminals out of minority neighborhoods. If blame is to be assigned, it should be placed at the feet of the federal agencies that created the profiles. Instead, the federal government is actively using this issue to increase its power over local police departments.

In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President George W. Bush insisted that "racial profiling ... must end" -- despite the fact that nobody can prove that it ever began. On February 27th he issued a directive to Attorney General Ashcroft ordering him to "work in cooperation with State and local law enforcement in order to assess the extent and nature of any such practices."

In a March 1st press conference announcing his intention to wipe out "racial profiling," Ashcroft recalled that as a senator he "had the happy privilege of working with Russ Feingold, [Democrat] senator from Wisconsin, toward legislation which would help us develop an understanding about the impact of racial profiling on American citizens." He expressed his willingness to implement legislation banning "racial profiling." In fact, he continued, if Congress does not produce satisfactory legislation soon, "I'll simply launch a study of my own, because I think this is an issue of such importance and magnitude...." In this fashion, Ashcroft kept alive the Clinton/Reno tradition of defying Congress and ignoring constitutional limits on Executive Branch authority.

In 1999, the Clinton/Reno Justice Department filed suit against the New Jersey State Police, claiming that the agency was guilty of "racial profiling." As a result, notes MacDonald, the administration of then-New Jersey Governor (and current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator) Christine Todd Whitman dismissed outright "drug and weapons charges against 128 defendants," who had insisted that police had pulled them over "merely because of race." New Jersey State Troopers are now required to "monitor the length of traffic stops that individual officers make and correlate it to the race of the motorist. [They] will also monitor by race the computer checks that individual officers run on license plates, on the theory that racist officers will spend more time bothering innocent black motorists and will improperly target them for background checks. Of course an officer's stop and arrest data will be closely scrutinized for racial patterns as well. And if in fact such investigatory techniques correlate with race because more minorities are breaking the law? Too bad for the cop. He will be red-flagged as a potential racist."

The outcome in New Jersey is just a foretaste of what police departments nationwide can expect if the Bush administration makes good on its stated intentions. According to Ralph Boyd Jr., the administration's assistant attorney general for civil rights, more lawsuits against state and local police departments may be necessary in order to eradicate the supposed scourge of "racial profiling." "There may be people we need to clobber over the head, and if we need to clobber people over the head, we'll do that," Boyd told the July 26th Boston Globe. According to the Globe, "Boyd said the Justice Department would collect racial data on policing, expedite individual complaints about alleged profiling and set up programs to train and monitor local police."

Although the New Jersey State Police were the targets of the only "racial profiling" suit filed against a police department by the Justice Department, more than a dozen other agencies were targeted for "pattern and practice" lawsuits during the Clinton/Reno reign. Such lawsuits lodge murky allegations of unspecified "civil rights" violations by police officers, and threaten severe civil penalties unless the affected city governments sign "consent decrees" effectively deeding control over their police to the Justice Department.

"What usually happens," explained Officer Carnell to THE NEW AMERICAN, "is that a city will sign off on agent decree that police officers had nothing to do with and do not support. All they know is that they've been labeled 'racists' and left twisting the in the wind." Such consent decrees, wherein the city agrees to submit to U.S. Justice Department mandates, have been forced upon New York City, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Columbus, Ohio, and similar lawsuits have been filed against Dallas, Houston, and other cities. And, as noted above, the Bush administration is eager to continue this anti-police jihad.

Local, Independent, Accountable

With their every effort to enforce the law under the opportunistic gaze of race-obsessed radicals, and the federal government threatening to "clobber them over the head" it isn't a mystery why so many police officers are either acting as "tourists in blue" or investigating another line of work.

Under the Constitution, law enforcement was to be carried out almost exclusively by the individual states and their subsidiaries. As James Madison observed in The Federalist, No. 45, the "numerous and indefinite" powers reserved to the states would "extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State." Keeping police locally accountable, and independent from federal control, would prevent the dangerous consolidation of power that is the hallmark of every tyranny -- and this is particularly true of modern police-state monstrosities like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

The "Thin Blue Line" exists not only to protect the property and persons of the law-abiding from the depredations of violent criminals, but also to act as an institutional impediment to the centralized consolidation of power. This is why the power elites have joined with the criminal class in a combined assault upon local police. And this is why it is more important than ever before that Americans support their local police, and work to restore their independence from federal control.