Profile This!
August 18, 2003
When I hear members of the black and Latino communities complain about being profiled by law enforcement, I yawn. What’s the big deal? I’m willing to bet that I’ve been stopped by more cops than 99% of all gang members, and 100% of all law-abiding citizens, no matter what color they are.
Now, it’s true that, aside from getting my share of traffic tickets, I haven’t had too many dealings with the law over the past four decades. But between the time I was 12 and, say, 22, I was probably stopped at least two dozen times.
It all began when my family moved to an apartment that was located a block beyond the poor, southern boundary of Beverly Hills. As it happens, I often rode my bicycle into that chi-chi community either to visit one of the two book stores on little Santa Monica or to practice my set-shot at a Beverly Hills school playground that was about a half mile from my home.
I was never surprised -- especially when I was peddling after dark -- to be stopped and questioned by a cop. He would ask me where I lived, where I was going, and then call the station to find out if I was wanted for anything.
The entire process took about a minute or two. When I turned 16 and started driving, I continued getting stopped on a regular basis. But now the L.A. cops joined their Beverly Hills brethren in Operation Prelutsky. The problem was that I looked so young that cops spotting me at the wheel of the family car quite naturally took me for a 13-year-old out joy-riding. Why anyone, whatever his age, would swipe a seven year old Chevy sedan is anybody’s guess, but the cops must have assumed that I was not only a thief, but that I had lousy taste in cars.
By the time I was attending college, I had quit driving the Chevy and was riding a motorcycle. On those nights I worked late at the UCLA Daily Bruin and would find myself tootling down Sunset after midnight, once again in the domain of the BHPD, I could count on being stopped on a regular basis.
Now that I look back on those years, I may have been stopped as many as forty or fifty times. And whether or not you choose to believe it, I never took offense. Now, how could it be that I, who had no criminal record, wasn’t angry about being stopped and questioned more times than Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel put together? Simple. It’s because I agreed with the cops. I was a suspicious character. I knew there weren’t a lot of kids riding their bikes in Beverly Hills at night. I knew only too well that I looked too young to be legally driving a car. I knew I was the only person riding through Beverly Hills on a motorcycle in the wee hours of the morning. Why on earth wouldn’t they stop and question me?
I honestly felt the cops were right. They weren’t beating me up or trying to make me confess to unsolved crimes, for crying out loud! They’d ask me who I was and what I was up to, and then, satisfied, they’d send me on my way. I don’t recall any of them apologizing for the inconvenience.
But, why should they? They were earning their salary. It wasn’t as if they were warning me never again to ride my bike, car or motorcycle, in their neck of the woods.
In short, if I had been a cop, I would have stopped me. You want to call it profiling, fine; I call it doing their job.
Unless you’re some sort of politically correct, lying, yahoo, you’ll admit that you’ve seen cars filled with young, sullen-looking blacks, Chicanos, and whites, in neighborhoods where they obviously didn’t live – and if you’d been a cop, you’d have pulled them over and asked a few questions of your own.
But, then, there are some pinheads nowadays who insist that for every 25 year-old Muslim interrogated by airport security, a 75 year old grandmother and a two year old toddler should be strip-searched.
In this day and age, when we are told on the one hand that society should be colorblind, but that Affirmative Action should allow blacks and browns to leapfrog over whites and yellows, clear thinking is the biggest victim of bigotry. It’s common sense that’s being moved to the back of the bus.
Affirmative Action, according to its proponents, is supposed to make up for what white Americans did to black Americans a very long time ago. Well, carried to its logical and obscene extreme, a strong argument could be made for blacks being allowed to have white slaves! And, before his presidential campaign is over, I fully expect Al Sharpton to make it part of his platform.
It sounds silly, I know, but how is it any sillier than blacks demanding reparations for slavery? For one thing, the ancestors of most living Americans didn’t even come to this country until decades after slavery ended. For another, the number of white Americans who died in the war to end slavery far exceeded the number of whites who owned slaves.
So, possibly, an argument could be made that those blacks who are constantly demanding that America apologize for slavery -- without ever taking the Arabs to task for rounding up their ancestors and delivering them to the slave ships--should finally come forward and thank the ancestors of those who died at Shiloh and Bull Run and Gettysburg, for having made the ultimate sacrifice.
©2003 Burt Prelutsky
