A tale of two cities, divided by racial profiling

By Nick Zamiska

For some students, a backpack's sole purpose is to transport books. Not so for Terrence Jones, BR '01.

Jones, co-president of the Black Student Alliance at Yale, said, "Because of the perception of black males, I do not like to go anywhere without a bag. I don't like the way people look at me, because they're asking themselves, `Does he go here?'"

KATIE ALDRICH/YH Dixwell Avenue, which runs from downtown New Haven into Hamden, was the site of a hotly contested racial profiling incident this summer.

Such subtle signs of racial profiling, a term most often associated with law enforcement and traffic cops, often go unnoticed at Yale. But recently, New Haven residents have brought the issue of racial profiling to the political foreground. W. David Lee, DIV '93, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue in New Haven, swears by the Yale decal that he keeps in his rear windshield.

"I put the Yale stickers in my rear window because of incidents with state troopers," he said. Lee says that he has never been stopped with the stickers on. He added that, during his time at the Divinity School, he wore Yale paraphenalia to ward off probing security officers, and said of Jones's aversion to leaving his dorm without a backpack, "That's exactly what we did."

Some New Haven residents who live along the border between Hamden and the Elm City—what's often called the Mason-Dixon line of the New Haven area—argue that gross violations of their civil rights on the part of a nearly all-white Hamden police force are a regular part of life.

But Hamden's chief of police, Robert Nolan, disagreed. "Coming up Dixwell Avenue, most people don't know when they leave New Haven and enter Hamden because they just run together," Nolan said.

Despite the proximity of the cities, Dixwell Avenue serves double duty as both a geographic and ethnic dividing line between New Haven and Hamden. According to the 1990 Census, 40 percent of New Haven's population was black, as opposed to Hamden's overwhelmingly white population of 91 percent.

An incident in late June ignited tensions between New Haven's black community and Nolan's police force, which consists of approximately 100 officers—only two of whom are black. Nolan described one incident in which a drunk black male "came out of a side street onto Dixwell Avenue, went through a traffic light, a red light, and almost hit one of our cruisers." The Hamden police officer made the stop no more than a few hundred feet into New Haven's town line.

Fifteen people were injured that day by the drunk driver, but many New Haven residents claim that frequent chases into New Haven by Hamden cops result in avoidable injury to innocent bystanders. Nolan staunchly maintains that, at least in this case, "the total distance between [the perpetrator's vehicle that] almost hit our cruiser was a total of six-tenths of a mile. There was no chase."

Accusations of frequent racial profiling led to a several meetings at Reverend Lee's Church among the leaders of the black community, elected officials, and the police chiefs from both cities. "As far as I'm concerned," Nolan said, "those meetings were very fruitful. It's been a pleasure meeting with them."

According to Lee, however, "we had come up with a plan [to facilitate community policing], and that plan was not supposed to be released until we had all agreed and talked about it." But the plan that had been preliminarily settled upon was released early to the New Haven Register on Monday.

Lee, frustrated with the Hamden administration, accused the police of acting "duplicitously" by prematurely publicizing the press release. As a result, the Reverend held a press conference on Wed., Sept. 20, as a forum for the black community to voice its opinions. Lee said of the conference, "He [Nolan] was not invited to this one."

In response to Lee's accusations, Nolan defended his department by saying that of the approximately 12,000 total arrests made in 1999, three-quarters of them were white criminals. These figures, however, do not necessarily represent the number of people detained.

Nolan also emphasized the fact that unlike many departments in Connecticut, his "has mandatory `sensitivity and diversity' training every single month for every officer."

Lee, however, does not feel such training has worked. "The police of Hamden are, in fact, doing racial profiling," he said. "They see skin color." On the other hand, Lee praised New Haven's cops, saying that they were "operating much better as far as our community is concerned and the Latino community—all because we have a police force that accurately reflects [the racial makeup] of the community in which it serves. A black police chief also definitely doesn't hurt."

Jonathan Holloway, an assistant professor of African- American Studies at Yale, agreed that "striving towards a some representation [in the racial makeup of a law enforcement body] doesn't mean you get it, but [the fact] that you're working towards it is important."

With a more diversified police force, "at least the first visual barrier of resistance can be passed by...because people respond visually and viscerally to racial impulses," Holloway said. A representative police force is simply a "pragmatic" necessity in law, he added.

While law enforcement on the whole has been put on the defensive recently, Holloway said that "the majority of cops are pretty decent people." Holloway said that he understood the tendency toward racial profiling, and although he would never "excuse it," he does "understand where it is coming from."

But Holloway's understanding of this phenomenon has not protected him from being a target of racial profiling. As a graduate student at Yale, Holloway claims he suffered discrimination based on racial presumptions when dressed "shabbily, wearing sweatpants, unshaven, and a long coat." Nevertheless, Holloway said, "when I was in my [well-dressed] grad student persona, I was not seen as a threat. I wasn't harassed ever."

Back to News...