Long Road Ahead

Continued police brutality and racial profiling mark the 10 years since the Rodney King beating

by Jackie Jones

John Mitchell's story: A reporter who got involved.

The Buzz: Would you become part of the story?

Have Things Improved?: A panel discussion.

Long Road Ahead:

Ten years after Rodney King was beaten senseless by four Los Angeles police officers, pundits and public officials, especially in the black community, are revisiting the incident and asking aloud whether much has changed when it comes to police.

Well, I have a few words for them: Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and racial profiling. That's more than enough change for me. And none of it good.

Just Tuesday night (Feb. 27), President Bush said in his address to Congress that he had directed Attorney General John Ashcroft "to develop specific recommendations to end racial profiling. It's wrong, and we will end it in America."

It shouldn't take Ashcroft long.

In June 1999, President Clinton directed federal law enforcement agencies to gather data on the race, ethnicity and gender of people detained for questioning, in an effort to determine how widespread racial profiling was.

That presidential order came on the heels of the conviction of a second police officer in the vicious beating of Louima, a Haitian immigrant.

Even before Clinton's order, some federal agencies had begun collecting such information. The U.S. Customs Service began collecting racial and ethnic data on people searched by its officers. About a dozen lawsuits have been filed against the agency alleging it targets blacks and other people of color unfairly.

Clinton also asked state and local police departments to collect similar information. Several regional studies already appear to have documented the problem well.

For example, in Maryland where state troopers are required to note the race of drivers stopped by police, African American drivers accounted for 27 percent of the police stops in 1999 along a stretch of Interstate 95, northeast of Baltimore, although they made up only 17 percent of the motorists.

That's a lot of people when you stop to think they are moving targets. Poor Diallo and Louima were on foot.

Four New York City police officers were acquitted of killing Diallo, who was unarmed, in a barrage of 41 bullets.

The accused officers were members of a plainclothes unit that allegedly stopped and frisked young black men without cause. The night of the shooting, police said they were combing the neighborhood for a suspected rapist. Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, was shot in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building, as he reached for ID to show police.

Police said they thought Diallo was going for a weapon.

Louima was targeted by an officer following a disturbance outside a nightclub that Louima was trying to break up. Witnesses say that after the officer removed his holster, he began shoving Louima.

Louima was arrested and taken to a police station where he ultimately was beaten and sodomized with a broomstick. He underwent three operations in two months for injuries that included a ruptured colon and bladder.

Two police officers and a former colleague were found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice about the colleague's role in the beating.

It took two trials to win a conviction.

Last year, a report about the Los Angeles Police Department revealed that during the 1990s, a cabal of rogue officers in an anti-gang unit in the Rampart division planted evidence, beat handcuffed gang members, lied under oath and shot unarmed suspects in the city's toughest neighborhood.

An internal LAPD probe showed that at least 99 defendants might have been framed by the rogue cops. So far, at least 100 criminal convictions involving Rampart officers have been overturned, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. Additionally, nearly 40 officers have received some form of discipline, including five who have been fired.

It doesn't exactly instill confidence in communities of color, especially the African American community, that running into a police officer should be a good thing.

King had his problems. He fled police that fateful night because he had a record, was intoxicated and feared going back to jail. He should have been pulled over. He should have been arrested. But the beating he got far exceeded what was reasonable in that case.

Diallo and Louima were innocent and unarmed. One man is dead. The other has suffered emotional scars equal to the horrific physical injuries inflicted upon him.

Both New York and Los Angeles police departments have taken steps to ensure greater sensitivity and reduce brutality, but the trauma of these events -- and others like them -- are still too close for comfort for the black community.

"As government promotes compassion, it also must promote justice," President Bush told Congress. "Too many of our citizens have cause to doubt our nation's justice when the law points a finger of suspicion at groups instead of individuals. All our citizens are created equal and must be treated equally."

Nice words. Now it's time to see if the walk will match the talk.

Jackie Jones is a former national board member of the National Association of Black Journalists. Currently, she is an assistant city editor at the Washington Post. She can be reached by e-mail at jonesja@washpost.com