Time To Re-Evaluate The Criminal Profile

Put yourself behind the wheel of David Casteal’s car.

You are 28 years old. A Whitworth College graduate, now a teacher at Cooper Elementary School in Spokane.

You have no criminal record. But the law enforcement guys and gals in the Inland Northwest seem to love you! In two years, city police, county sheriff’s deputies and Washington State patrol officers have stopped your car 14 times. Let’s repeat that - 14 times.

Officers have frisked you, taken your license away, questioned you intensely. They’ve given you nine tickets, totaling $3,000 in fines.

How does all this make you feel?

Can anyone really be that reckless of a driver, especially someone whose life outside the car seems so functional?

Well, perhaps. But Casteal doesn’t think so. He believes the traffic stops are a direct result of the color of his skin.

He’s black.

So Casteal took his concerns to the Spokane Police Department’s Citizens Review Panel. The panel recently voted to forward a complaint to the Public Safety Committee. It was the first time the review panel has taken such action in its two-year history.

Casteal is to be commended for the courage to complain. The panel is to be commended for the courage to take the complaint seriously and demand it be looked into.

Few in the African-American community were surprised at what happened to Casteal. They’ve talked about this phenomenon for years. Guy Thomas, a member of the African-American Forum in Spokane, welcomed the panel’s action. “It’s time to focus on this,” he said. “We can’t let the momentum die.”

A month ago, Thomas, a 28-year-old Spokane businessman, wrote a Your Turn column for The Spokesman-Review in which he discussed being stopped by the Washington State Patrol because his “license plate covers were tinted.” After his article ran, he heard from a dozen black men who told him of similar incidents.

We recognize that law enforcement people are just doing their jobs. They depend on criminal profiles, discretion and intuition to guide them. Reports of gang infiltration of the Inland Northwest have everyone scared, and gang members are often from minority groups.

But what’s worrisome is that these traffic stops might be an indication of a larger problem, one documented a few years ago by the National Commission on Crime and Justice. The commission reported that “persons of color are subjected to disadvantages at every stage of the criminal process,” from arrest to sentencing to imprisonment. Nearly half the state and federal prisoners are black, although African Americans make up only about 12 percent of the general population.

Minorities, the commission concluded, are not innately more criminal than white people, but are “perceived to be more threatening and therefore easier targets for police.”

Casteal and the panel sent the important message that something unfair might be going on in the streets, highways and freeways of the Inland Northwest. It’s time for a closer, critical look.