[ OUR OPINION ]

Bush issues adequate
racial profiling ban

THE ISSUE President Bush has issued guidelines barring federal law enforcement agents from using racial profiling in routine investigations.

TARGETING criminal suspects based solely on race or ethnicity is a disgraceful law enforcement practice that President Bush denounced in his first address to Congress and now has banned for use by federal agencies. The exceptions in guidelines directed this week to those agencies in cases of terrorism and national security are a matter of common sense.

The president issued the guidelines governing the conduct of 70 government agencies, 18 of which employ 94 percent of all federal law enforcement officers. The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized the guidelines because they allow the kind of racial profiling that resulted in the singling out of Middle Easterners following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America. Most of that precautionary activity was justified for security purposes, and the guidelines prohibit unjustified profiling even under those unusual circumstances.

For example, the guidelines say, a man entering a courthouse should not be subject to special scrutiny "absent any threat warning or other particular reason to suspect that those of the man's apparent ethnicity pose a heightened danger." However, a hypothetical intelligence report that Middle Eastern terrorists are planning to hijack airliners at a California airport would allow security personnel to subject "heightened security" to men appearing to be of Middle Eastern origin attempting to board planes at California airports.

Otherwise, law enforcement officials are to regard race only as one among various elements of "a specific suspect description." For instance, according to the guidelines, a federal officer looking for a fleeing bank-robbery suspect described as "a man of a particular race and particular hair color in his 30s driving a blue automobile" may use that description, including race, in deciding which speeding motorists to pull over.

Racial profiling has been more common among city and state law enforcement officers than federal agents. The Justice Department pressured the city of Pittsburgh to allow federal monitoring after charges of police brutality and racial profiling in 1997. The department also brought charges against the New York Police Department for stopping and frisking too many people who belong to a minority.

Numerous states preceded the federal government in taking action to stop or study racial profiling. Hawaii has not taken such action, but the fact that the state's prison population does not reflect the islands' racial distribution does not necessarily result from racial profiling. Racial disparity in arrests may reflect more accurately the economic differences across Hawaii's ethnically diverse landscape. Studies in this area would be helpful in determining the cause of such disparities.