Good Cop Bad Cop

Book Review

Good Cop, Bad Cop written by Milton Heumann and Lance Cassak offers much

in depth reading into the history and debate of racial profiling. Each author brings to the

table an educated history with Heumann being Chair of the Department of Political

Science at Rutgers University and Cassak is a lawyer with the Office of Thrift

Supervision of the U. S. Department of Treasury. Both Heumann and Cassak reveal key

information about racial profiling in three specific chapters.

The first chapter contains lots of facts about the present day issue of racial

profiling and how it got started. They also try to answer the question of how racial

profiling went from being unknown to a huge issue in law enforcement. In its beginnings

in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s racial profiling was used more of a scientific approach

in investigations. Experts were trained, like psychologists and psychiatrists to narrow the

possibilities of who might commit a crime. It wasn’t used as a hunch used by police

officers, but it uses past facts to decide what type of person or persons could have

committed a certain violent crime. In the case Terry versus Ohio race was brought up as

an issue of an arrest of two young, African-American men who had concealed weapons.

This is the case which has sparked the issue of racial profiling instead of just criminal

profiling.

The second chapter explains how successful a non-racial profile could be. The

profile was named the Airport Drug Courier profile. It had some success because of 96

searches, 77 resulted in which drugs were found. In the 1980’s courts came across many

cases in which profiling was mentioned. Some cases had to decide if race played a factor

or if fourth amendment rights were violated. A majority of the cases were thrown out if

the defendant gave consent to a search. Most defendants in that case fit the Airport Drug

Courier perfectly. Even afterwards