Opinion ID: 771507
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: General Concerns

Text: For better or worse, it is a fact of life in our diverse culture that race is used on a daily basis as a shorthand for physical appearance. This is as true in police work as anywhere else. The theories suggested by the dissenters would require a police officer, before acting on a physical description that contains a racial element, to balance myriad competing considerations, one of which would be the risk of being subject to strict scrutiny in an equal protection lawsuit. Moreover, the officer frequently would have to engage in such balancing while under the pressure of a time-sensitive pursuit of a potentially dangerous criminal. Police work, as we know it, would be impaired and the safety of all citizens compromised. The most vulnerable and isolated would be harmed the most and, if police effectiveness is hobbled by special racial rules, residents of inner cities would be harmed most of all. There have been times and places in this country in which the police have tolerated crime in African-American communities. See, e.g., John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937). They have done this on a variety of assumptions, all of them degrading, and one of them was that the victims in these neighborhoods were somehow less important to the then dominant white community from which the police drew their support. Although still imperfect, the more racially diverse police of today generally strive to serve and protect those within African-American communities as they do those within every other community. I have little doubt that the rules of constitutional law proposed by my colleagues would weaken police protection within all communities. Regrettably, the social costs of frustrating police investigations receive no mention in either dissent. In my view, it is a grave mistake to seize upon an idea that would alter police work and law enforcement procedures fundamentally without fully considering its effect on those most vulnerable to crime. In addition to potentially chilling police protection, and tying up officers in added court proceedings, these new rules would be implicated in many ordinary police investigations. As a result, these rules would likely undermine the strict scrutiny standard itself, because apprehending dangerous criminals in almost all instances would constitute a compelling state interest. Frequent satisfaction of strict scrutiny as police go about their daily work of investigating crime would likely have spillover effects into other areas of equal protection law, diluting the standard's efficacy where we would want it to retain its power.