YOUNGSTOWN Professor: Laws will limit liberties

Racial profiling by police can be either official or unofficial, a lawyer said.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Some restrictions on civil liberties are likely and may be justified as the country works to prevent further terrorist attacks, a criminal justice professor said here Monday.
"We, as citizens, are going to probably have to lose some of our civil liberties because the potential risk is so great," said Allen Pierce, professor of criminal justice at Youngstown State University.
Pierce, a former police officer who teaches the laws of arrest, search and seizure to students of law enforcement, characterized himself as "a bit of a civil libertarian." He said he wondered whether the new anti-terrorism law President Bush signed last week will be used not just against terrorism but eventually in the general realm of criminal law.
"I'm very concerned about citizens' Constitutional rights. I'm very concerned that some of our rights will be taken away," Pierce told an audience of several dozen people during a panel discussion at YSU, which focused on racial profiling, the police practice of targeting people of a specific race or ethnicity for stops or arrests.
"Profiling is a method of identifying particular criminal-type profiles, of which race is only one factor. And when it's a problem is when race becomes the factor for the stop," Pierce said.
Police profiling: Atty. Ronald Miller, executive director of the Youngstown Area Urban League, said he hopes the official form of racial profiling based on police department policy is declining, but he is concerned about unofficial profiling by police based on custom.
Others said the issue of profiling is much broader than just the police or just race and ethnicity.
Dawud Abdullah, worship leader at the Youngstown Islamic Center, said much of the harassment of Islamic people in the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has been "perpetrated by just average people, not the police force." He also said there is no justification for terrorism in The Koran, the Muslim holy book, or in the life of the prophet Mohammed, founder of the Muslim religion. "Terrorism has no basis in Islam," he said.
Other groups targeted: Lt. Robin Lees of the Youngstown Police Department, who went to Columbus earlier this year to assist in development of a statewide profiling curriculum for Ohio police officers, said profiling includes "bias-based" actions, not just against people of a certain race, but also against other groups, such as gay people or young people.
Cynthia Carter, a retired Army master sergeant, said racial profiling by police, which she defined as "stopping, harassing people solely based on their race," is based on stereotypes that associate people of certain races with criminal activity.
The forum was sponsored by the Pan African Student Union and Protestant Campus Ministry.