Two researchers at Iowa State are trying to change the way law enforcement and the black community interact.

Helle Bunzel and Philippe Marcoul, assistant professors of economics, said they hope to shed light on the way many blacks and other minorities feel targeted.

Despite the civil rights movement and education, Bunzel and Marcoul said they believe their research will prove more blacks are pulled over by police officers hoping to convict more criminals.

Bunzel and Marcoul said blacks are assumed to be criminals more often than their Caucasian counterparts.

“If one race has a higher crime rate, [police] targeting them has resulted in more criminals caught,” Bunzel said. “But we don’t know if one race has a higher crime rate.”

Bunzel said current crime rate data that comes from imprisonment numbers and police self-reporting is unreliable and subject to biases of individual police officers.

Marquis Jones, junior in pre-computer science, said he thinks racial biases, including those of law enforcement, are still an issue.

“It is natural for cops to pull us over and say negative things,” Jones said. “Growing up in Chicago, I became accustomed to it. I have always felt anxiety about officers.”

Jones is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black fraternity in history, founded in 1906 at Cornell University. He said people have negative stereotypes about his race, even in Ames.

“People are hesitant about being approached by or approaching someone of color,” Jones said. “And this is 2004. Not 1964, but today, 2004.”

Solutions are difficult to find, and they could involve community efforts, Bunzel and Marcoul said.

“We need to try to reward officers for other things than how many criminals they catch,” Marcoul said.

A study at the University of Pennsylvania said police officers are not racist, but want to catch criminals.

Bunzel and Marcoul said the study may show law enforcement officers are not racist, but more often relate criminal behavior to blacks. The ISU researchers want to find accurate numbers that could change the way police officers think.

This could become possible with new legislation requiring officers to record the race of every person stopped and charged on highway patrol.

Ames Police Cmdr. Jim Robinson said racial profiling does not affect traffic stops.

“Officers do not make stops under racial profiling,” Robinson said. “They are stopped because they are making traffic violations, not because they are black, white, brown or any other color.”

Robinson said minority groups from campus often speak with officers to help them understand cultural differences and customs.

Marcoul said the research he and Bunzel are doing did not spawn from thesis papers or any other academic form.

“This research is really our baby,” Marcoul said. “It was borne from discussion, rather than Ph.D. work.”