Looking for Richard Jewell, police let John Muhammad go

The racial profiling of white men in the sniper case had fatal costs. According to the Washington Post, police stopped John Muhammad’s faded blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice at least ten different times during the search for the sniper, but saw no reason to link the car to the sniper attacks until this week.

Ten times, authorities thought the car warranted enough suspicion that they ran its license-plate number through a national police database, sources said. Each time, however, they let the driver go after finding no record that it had been stolen or that its occupants were wanted for any crimes.

Police said the weather-beaten Chevrolet with whitewall tires did not attract closer scrutiny because they were mistakenly fixated on other vehicles—a white van, a box truck, a cream-colored Toyota.

“We were looking for a white van with white people, and we ended up with a blue car with black people,” said Washington, D.C., Police Chief Charles Ramsey.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 26, 2002 02:39 PM | Send