Lawsuits draws more attention to racial profiling of consumers

Recent lawsuits against Macy's, Dillard's and JCPenney are attracting new attention to racial profiling of consumers, something minority shoppers say has long been an unfortunate fact of life.

While the retail industry says profiling cases are isolated and the result of overly aggressive employees rather than company policies, minority customers complain they've been viewed suspiciously, sometimes refused service and falsely accused of shoplifting.

Consumers may have accepted such treatment as the norm in years past, said Jerome D. Williams, director of the Center for Marketplace Diversity at Howard University. But, increasingly, "people are tired of it," he said. "People recognize they have some legal rights now."

Minority consumers, primarily blacks and Hispanics, have complained for years of mistreatment in hotels, restaurants, and a range of other stores, he said. Denny's, a restaurant chain accused of making blacks prepay for meals, paid $54 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in 1994, and Adam's Mark Hotel settled allegations that its Daytona Beach hotel discriminated against black guests for $1.1 million in 2001.

According to a recent Gallup poll, half of U.S. blacks said they felt blacks in their community were treated less fairly than whites in stores and malls.

Williams and two other business professors found more than 80 consumer profiling cases filed in federal courts since 1990. Even more cases have been brought in state courts. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many have been filed by Arabs and Muslims, said Anne-Marie Harris, an assistant professor at Salem State College's School of Business, who is working with Williams.

Suits against Dillard's, Macy's and JCPenney were all filed within the last two months.

Paula Mays, 45, claims she was falsely accused of shoplifting, slammed into a wall and pushed to the floor after she exchanged a belt at a JCPenney store in Jacksonville, Fla. Mays sued the company in April in federal court, claiming her civil rights were violated.

"I don't think I ever would have been treated like that if I wasn't black," said Mays, 45, who was shopping with her teenage daughter. "I don't want anybody else to be treated like that."

Last month, Jannie Lewis filed a lawsuit against Dillard's alleging, among other things, that it profiles minorities based on race, violating the Texas constitution. Lewis said a security officer at a Tyler, Texas, store falsely accused her of stealing.

"It had to be because I was black. There was no other reason. I did no more than women do all the time. We look, we look, we look," said Lewis, recounting how she was searching for the right shade of orange lipstick to match a dress when a security officer allegedly took her purse and searched it.

"It was a nightmare. I felt less than human, worthless, degraded, humiliated, embarrassed," said Lewis, 39. "Worst of all, it was right in front of my daughter. Nobody should have to feel the way I felt."

Dillard's, along with JCPenney and Macy's -- which was sued by a customer last month in New York -- declined to comment on individual lawsuits, but they say they don't profile or target any minority group.

"If somebody is racially profiling, it's an isolated incident," said Daniel Butler, the National Retail Federation's retail operations vice president. "It's the result of an associate acting independently on their own. It's not the result of a company's training or people directing them to do it.

"If the consumers knew the extent of fraud and theft, and the extent to which retailers are trying to fight that, I think they'd understand."

Retailers lose about $10 billion a year to shoplifting, according to the 2002 National Retail Security Survey report by researchers at the University of Florida.

To thwart shoplifters, stores train employees to look for certain behaviors -- not race, said Richard Hollinger, author of the Florida security survey.

"It's very unfair I think to paint the entire industry with one brush because, if you look at the record of lawsuits, there are some retailers that stand out as being sued much more frequently," Hollinger said.

In the case of Dillard's, lawyer Cletus Ernster is representing Lewis and more than 100 plaintiffs in suits against the store.

Company spokesman Skip Rutherford said the chain has "never had a policy of targeting any particular group, and any Dillard's employees who engage in such activity will be disciplined."

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is handling a separate complaint against Dillard's. Elise Boddie, assistant counsel at the fund, said she's had her own experience with what she calls "shopping while black."

"I'm very careful about how I move throughout the store," Boddie said. "I try not to put my hands in my pockets. You internalize a lot of the heightened racial scrutiny."