While I disagree with President Obama's move of inviting Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates to "have a beer" at the White House, he could not be more correct then when he pointed out "What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact." I believe that this is the natural outcome of placing too much power in the hands of the police, and why every law passed must really be thought over. Obama's approach is to attempt to change the culture of America through his inspirational words. Cultural changes like this, however, take a long time. Certainly Obama has the perfect opportunity and oratorical abilities to catalyze this change, but no matter how valiant President Obama's effort, and I support it entirely, this will be an accomplishment which will be a long time coming.
However, it is unfair for individual African Americans, and other minorities, to wait for the culture of America to change. The solution, therefore, should be to reduce the power of the police force; to make it much more difficult for individually police officers to act on their personal bigotry and racism. This must be done in two ways. First, as a branch of government, the police should have a federal legal obligation to video tape every encounter. Even if a cop has to "let someone go," because he didn't start his tape recorder, this obligation should still hold. The endless stream of youtube videos documenting the bigotry of American cops is disgusting, and it needs to be resolved now, not in 10 years. Second, and perhaps most importantly, the discriminatory laws which for example penalize the possession of "crack" far more than the possession of cocaine, must be repealed. It is these types of laws which are terribly unfair, and are responsible for much of the disproportional action of police with regards to race. President Obama has indicated that this is in his agenda, and I hope he is able to succeed.
Racial profiling is a practice which is thoroughly anathema to the values of the Declaration, as has been pointed out by great Americans from Jefferson, to Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, to Martin Luther King and now Barack Obama. To those who claim that in practice, racial profiling is necessary to reduce crime, I would respond that practicality is no excuse for bigotry. The costs of racial profiling (hurt feelings and a dereliction of American values) far outweigh any possible benefit.
