Earlier this
season there was a terrific ER episode where the diner across the street is
robbed, and people are killed. (wow—what a great way to start, eh?) Dr. Chen is the person who saw the perpetrators. She describes the vehicle the two men drove
off in, and—when pressed—gives a physical description. She happened to believe that the people who
did it were of African-American descent, though she wouldn’t swear to it. (when
she saw them, she didn’t know that they had robbed the restaurant—so it wasn’t
something that stood out in her mind, necessarily.)
So, later in the
episode, Gallant & Pratt (who are
both black men) are pulled over on the way back from the YMCA. They’re in the same color & model of
vehicle that Dr. Chen described to the police.
They are treated harshly, and when a bloody shirt is found in the back
and they point out that they work at County hospital, they’re hauled down to
the station for questioning. (we, as viewers, know that the shirt is bloody
because Pratt injured his hand while playing basketball and had wiped it on his
shirt…)
Their alibi checks
out, and after hours of questioning they’re finally released. Gallant is angry, and wants to press
charges. Pratt gives his standard “this
is how life is for our kind of people” speech, and they go on with their days,
pissed off.
Totally
understandable.
Then Pratt finds
out that Chen is the one who identified the perpetrators by their race. And he’s furious. He points out that he got pulled over because of his ethnicity,
and Chen realizes that she was wrong for identifying the guys when she didn’t
see them clearly.
Now, what bothers
me about this episode? Never, in the
entire hour, is it pointed out that Gallant & Pratt are initially pulled
over because of their vehicle. It is
repeatedly said that they were stopped and questioned because of their
race. However, I must point out that
it’s the vehicle that got them noticed.
Then their sex, then their race (since it is a way of narrowing suspects down). Added to that is the bloody shirt and the fact that they know
that diner and the area in which it’s located.
Whether that kind
of police action (in narrowing down suspects through points of identification)
is appropriate was not in question. The
character who defended this kind of action (Dr. Corday) did not defend the
process of finding perpetrators based factors given by eye-witness accounts,
she defended racial profiling (comparing it to her recent flight from England,
where an Arabic patron was pulled aside and searched). Call me crazy, but it seems that they
ignored the real issue at hand. They
created potential “racial profiling” while ignoring the other factors that led
to the boys being taken to the station.
And during the fight with her
boyfriend, Chen never pointed out that the vehicle was the solid ID she gave,
and that he happened to be driving an identical vehicle.
The thing that
should’ve been argued about racial inequalities, in my opinion, was the way the
police officers treated them. But then,
my father (former police officer) totally defended their actions, and he never
had a reputation for being rough or violent with suspects. (And while I know he is less aware of his
own racial biases than he could be, I also know that he married outside of his
race and always treats people equally—at least in my presence. ) So, maybe
there’s something that I’m too uneducated to know about in the realms of police-keeping.
But still, I’ve
always been a little irked about that episode for many reasons. There are so many ways to work in the
horrible aspect of racial profiling into a show like ER. In this case, what bothered me the most was
not the aspect that Pratt & Gallant felt like victims of racial
profiling—maybe they were, and I’m seeing it through culturally biased
eyes?—but that the person who defended the police force’s actions was defending
the principal of racial profiling, rather than trying to be objective about the
situation, rather than pointing out that it wasn’t one profile based on race,
but five based on: vehicle, gender, race, proximity, and potential
evidence. And the fact is, they never
went anywhere with it. Gallant never
sought out an attorney to deal with the unjust situation. Chen never pointed out to Pratt that she
understood the bigotry of the world, since she is also of a minority ethnicity
in the US. Chunie and Yoshi and Luka
never jumped in to talk about their experiences as Puerto Ricans,
Asian-Americans, or Eastern European immigrants, respectively. There was so much that could’ve been done,
either in that episode or the shows to follow.
I’m not trying to
say that racial profiling doesn’t exist.
It does, and it sickens me. And
I’m not trying to say that the police action in this particular episode was
right—I am quick to say that I don’t completely understand how Chicago law
supports or doesn’t support their movements.
I just think that if a relatively dim viewer like me could come up with
a reason to support the police, certainly Dr. Corday or one of the other
educated people could stand up and say it, rather than being the jerk who
supports racial profiling. (and can I quickly point out that Corday would be
the last person I’d expect to hear
that from? Romano, certainly, but not Lizzie!)
Instead the issue was painted in black and white, and all the shades of
grey were ignored.