“Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving,” the news organization reported in a recent article. “All but one said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime,” the small survey found. “Officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping.” These weren’t one-off events. “The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.”
A third of those officers say that they complained to supervisors. “All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions,” the story notes. “The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system.”
In any other context, conservative commentators would jump on a credible report from 24 public employees within a single bureaucracy, all alleging serious, systemic misconduct by rank-and-file workers (enabled or encouraged by lax supervisors). But the Reuters report was all but ignored by right-leaning sites that generally side with the police in the culture wars, as if support for Broken Windows policing and disdain for Al Sharpton somehow requires one to ignore or dismiss allegations of racial bias and a culture of retaliating against whistleblowers. It is myopic to do so given how closely the allegations dovetail with past critiques.
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