The ends can't always justify police means

I've grown accustomed to familiar responses when I share my opinions in The Post and Courier. Someone in my congregation or community will invariably tell me, "Thanks for saying what I'd like to say." When I suggest that they could say it as well as I do, they decline and say that they can't do so for fear of the loss of their jobs or of other retribution and prefer that I speak instead.

I thought of those familiar responses when I read The Post and Courier's recent and continual glowing coverage of the decline in crime in North Charleston and of the role of the North Charleston Police Department in facilitating that decline. Those news stories, columns and editorials also highlighted the use of strategic law enforcement in targeted communities and of selective law enforcement when it comes to traffic stops, and reported that the North Charleston Police Department has made efforts to "sell the stop" to justify their actions.

Those stories, columns and editorials also noted that not everyone agrees with the tactics employed by the North Charleston Police Department, but were vague when it came to identifying those with objections beyond continually quoting -- and sometimes misquoting -- Charleston NAACP President Dot Scott as a vocal opponent of police tactics that could be labeled as racial profiling. I sympathize with President Scott, who also happens to be a North Charleston resident. Many of those who agree with her and who make complaints to the NAACP in Charleston and North Charleston are in total agreement with her but are strategically silent.

Some of them simply don't want to be in the spotlight for possibly controversial statements. Some of them have made formal complaints to the North Charleston Police Department that have fallen on deaf and unresponsive ears and now think that speaking up or pursuing fair treatment doesn't matter. Some of them live in communities targeted for selective enforcement and fear that speaking out will bring unwanted attention from a Police Department with a longstanding track record of arbitrary and heavyhanded tactics.

Those in the latter group were aptly described in one of the recent Post and Courier stories that recounted how North Charleston police officers "pounded on doors" that were apprehensively opened so that they could distribute energy-efficient light bulbs as a symbolic token of "community policing." What the North Charleston Police Department assumed to be welcoming responses may have actually been efforts to "go with the program" and avoid possible punitive police attention.

The essential concern with the tactics of the North Charleston Police Department is whether the end justifies the means -- whether the best way to reduce crime is systematic and arbitrary coercion and intimidation of law-abiding citizens with the expectation that if a broad enough net is cast, some true offenders will be caught in the process. I don't think so.

The last three traffic stops I personally experienced were police checkpoints -- one in North Charleston, when I was visiting a parishioner in the very African-American Chicora-Cherokee community, and two in Charleston near the College of Charleston's campus. The Charleston Police Department regularly employs traffic checkpoints, but they do so in diverse areas of the City. The Charleston Police Department also generated considerable coverage by The Post and Courier a couple of years ago when they made an "open alcohol container" arrest not of a citizen on an African-American community street corner, but of a tourist in a "tourist friendly" area -- that's balanced and even-handed law enforcement.

The Post and Courier's recent stories have included statistics that concretely document the decline in crime in North Charleston. That's fitting and proper, because numbers don't lie. What's missing, however, is equal statistical documentation and media coverage of the North Charleston Police Department's traffic stops by ethnicity and neighborhood, by the nature of traffic offenses -- from speeding to faulty brake lights and "rolling stops," by fines levied and by stops that resulted in subsequent vehicle searches. I hope to soon see a story based on those statistics.

Media coverage with statistical inclusion would be helpful in determining whether the North Charleston Police Department is engaged in innovative crime prevention or in inappropriate racial profiling and harassment.

The Rev. Joseph A. Darby is senior pastor of Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church.